“I saved your life,” he said.
“I saved yours.”
“So we’re even. Leave it at that, Terry.”
McCaleb shook his head. It felt like there was a fist in his stomach pushing up into his chest, trying to get to his new heart.
“I think you knew that Lincoln and knew it meant trouble for me because you had watched Tafero before. Maybe on a night he was using the Lincoln. Maybe on a night he was watching Gunn and setting up the hit. Maybe on the night he made the hit. You saved my life because you knew something, Harry.”
McCaleb was quiet for a moment, giving Bosch an opportunity to say something in his defense.
“That’s a lot of maybes, Terry.”
“Yeah. A lot of maybes and one guess. My guess is that somehow you knew or you figured out back when Tafero hooked up with Storey that they would have to come after you in court. So you watched Tafero and you saw him draw the bead on Gunn. You knew what was going to happen and you let it happen.”
McCaleb took another long drink of beer and put the bottle back down on the railing.
“A dangerous game, Harry. They almost pulled it off. But I guess if I hadn’t come along you would’ve figured out some way of pointing it back at them.”
Bosch continued to stare out into the darkness and say nothing.
“The one thing I hope is that you weren’t the one who tipped Tafero that Gunn was in the tank that night. Tell me you didn’t make that call, Harry. Tell me you didn’t help get him out so they could kill him like that.”
Again Bosch said nothing. McCaleb nodded.
“You want to shake somebody’s hand, Harry, shake your own.”
Bosch dropped his gaze and looked down into the darkness below the deck. McCaleb watch him closely and saw him slowly shake his head.
“We do what we have to do,” Bosch said quietly. “Sometimes you have choices. Sometimes there is no choice, only necessity. You see things happening and you know they’re wrong but somehow they’re also right.”
He was silent for a long moment and McCaleb waited.
“I didn’t make that call,” Bosch said.
He turned and looked at McCaleb. Again McCaleb could see the shining points of light in the blackness of his eyes.
“Three people — three monsters — are gone.”
“But not that way. We don’t do it that way.”
Bosch nodded.
“What about your play, Terry? Pushing past the little brother into the office. Like you didn’t think that would start some shit. You pushed the action with that little move and you know it.”
McCaleb felt his face growing hot under Bosch’s stare. He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.
“You had your own plan, Terry. So what’s the difference?”
“The difference? If you don’t see it, then you have completely fallen. You are lost.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m lost and maybe I’ve been found. I’ll have to think about it. Meantime, why don’t you just go home now. Go back to your little island and your little girl. Hide behind what you think you see in her eyes. Pretend the world is not what you know it to be.”
McCaleb nodded. He’d said what he wanted to say. He stepped away from the railing, leaving his beer, and walked toward the door to the house. But Bosch hit him with more words as he entered the house.
“You think naming her after a girl nobody cared about or loved can make up for that lost girl? Well, you’re wrong, man. Just go home and keep dreaming.”
McCaleb hesitated in the doorway and looked back.
“Good-bye, Harry.”
“Yeah, good-bye.”
McCaleb walked through the house. When he passed the reading chair where the light was on he saw the printout of his profile of Bosch sitting on the arm of the chair. He kept going. When he got to the front door he pulled it closed behind him.
47
Bosch stood with his arms folded on the deck railing and his head down. He thought about McCaleb’s words, both spoken and printed. They were pieces of hot shrapnel ripping through him. He felt a deep tearing of his interior lining. It felt as though something within had seized him and was pulling him into a black hole, that he was imploding into nothingness.
“What did I do?” he whispered. “What did I do?” He straightened up and saw the bottle on the railing, its label gone. He grabbed it and threw it as far as he could out into the darkness. He watched its trajectory, able to follow its flight because of moonlight reflecting off the brown glass. The bottle exploded in the brush on the rocky hillside below.
He saw McCaleb’s half-finished beer and grabbed it. He pulled his arm back, wanting to throw this one all the way to the freeway. Then he stopped. He put the bottle back on the railing and went inside.
He grabbed the printed profile off the arm of the chair and started ripping the two pages apart. He went to the kitchen, turned the water on and put the pieces into the sink. He flicked on the garbage disposal and pushed the pieces of paper into the drain. He waited until he could tell by the sound that the paper had been chewed into nothing and was gone. He turned off the disposal and just watched the water running into the drain.
Slowly, his eyes came up and he looked through the kitchen window and out through the Cahuenga Pass. The lights of Hollywood glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere. He thought about all that was bad out there. A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all of that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance.
Bosch nodded and bent down. He closed his eyes, put his hands under the water and brought them up to his face. The water was cold and bracing, as he thought any baptism, the start of any second chance, should be.
48
He could still smell burned gunpowder. McCaleb stood in the master cabin and looked around. There were rubber gloves and other debris scattered on the floor. Black fingerprint dust was everywhere, on everything. The door to the room was gone and so was the doorjamb, cut right out of the wall. In the hallway an entire wall panel had been removed as well. McCaleb walked over and looked down at the floor where the little brother had died from the bullets he had fired. The blood had dried brown and would permanently stain the alternating light and dark wood strips in the floor. It would always be there to remind him.
Staring at the blood, he replayed the shots he had fired at the man, the images in his mind moving much slower than real time. He thought about what Bosch had said to him, out on the deck. About letting the little brother follow him. He considered his own culpability. Could his guilt be any less than Bosch’s? They had both set things in motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You don’t go into the darkness without the darkness going into you.
“We do what we have to do,” he said out loud.
He went up into the salon and looked out the door at the parking lot. The reporters were still up there with their vans. He had sneaked in. Parked at the far end of the marina and then borrowed a skiff from somebody’s boat to get to The Following Sea. He had climbed aboard and slipped in without anyone seeing him.
He noticed that the vans had their microwave towers cranked up and each crew was getting ready for the eleven o’clock report, the camera angles set so that The Following Sea would once more be in all the shots. McCaleb smiled and opened his phone. He hit a number on speed dial and Buddy Lockridge answered.
“Buddy, it’s me. Listen, I’m on the boat and I gotta go home. I want you to do me a favor.”
“You gotta go tonight? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, this is what I want you to do. When you hear me turn the Pentas over, you come over and untie me. Do it fast. I’ll do the rest.”
“You want me to go with you?”
“No, I’ll be fine. Catch an Express over on Friday. We’ve got the charter on Sat
urday morning.”
“All right, Terror. I heard on the radio it’s pretty flat out there tonight and no fog, but be careful.”
McCaleb closed the phone and went to the salon door. Most of the reporters and their crews were preoccupied and not looking at the boat because they had already assured themselves it was empty. He slid open the door and stepped out, shut the door and then quickly climbed the ladder to the bridge. He unzipped the plastic curtain that enclosed the bridge and slipped in. Making sure both throttles were in neutral, he engaged the choke and slid his key into the ignition.
He turned the key and the starters began to whine loudly. Looking back through the plastic curtain he saw the reporters had all turned to the boat. The engines finally turned over and he worked the throttles, revving the engines into a quick-start warm-up. He glanced back again and saw Buddy coming down the dock to the boat’s stern. A couple of the reporters were hurrying down the gangway to the dock behind him.
Buddy quickly uncleated the two stern lines and threw them into the cockpit. He then moved down the side pier to get the bow line. McCaleb lost sight of him but then heard his call.
“Clear!”
McCaleb took the throttles out of neutral and moved the boat out of the slip. As he made the turn into the fairway he looked back and saw Buddy standing on the side pier and the reporters behind him on the dock.
Once he was away from the cameras he unzipped the curtains and took them down. The cool air swept into the bridge and braced him. He sighted the flashing red lights of the channel markers and put the boat on course. He looked ahead, past the markers, into the darkness but saw nothing. He turned on the Raytheon and saw that which he could not see ahead. The island was there on the radar screen.
Ten minutes later, after he had cleared the harbor break line, McCaleb pulled the phone out of his jacket and speed-dialed home. He knew it was too late to call and that he was risking waking the children. Graciela answered in a whispered urgency.
“Sorry, it’s just me.”
“Terry, are you all right?”
“I am now. I’m coming home.”
“You’re crossing in the dark?”
McCaleb thought a moment about the question.
“I’ll be all right. I can see in the dark.”
Graciela didn’t say anything. She had an ability to know when he was saying one thing and talking about something else.
“Put the deck light on,” he said. “I’ll look for it when I get close.”
He closed the phone and pushed the throttles up. The bow started to rise and then leveled off. He passed the last channel marker twenty yards to his left. He was right on course. A three-quarter moon was high in the sky ahead and laying down a shimmering path of liquid silver for him to follow home. He held on tightly to the wheel and thought about the moment when he had truly thought he was going to die. He remembered the image of his daughter that had come to him and had comforted him. Tears started to roll down his cheeks. Soon the wind off the water dried them on his face.
A Darkness More Than Night (2000) Page 40