“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.”
“Actually,” I said, “we’re married. In a technical sense.”
“Huh?”
I explained that Mrs. Schmulowitz and I shared the same address. As such, any good lawyer (an oxymoron if there ever was one) would argue that we lived together. And that made her my common-law wife. Which made it perfectly permissible, I told the nurse, to be briefed on her condition.
“Sir, I really don’t have time to play games.”
“OK, look, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m just her tenant. But Mrs. Schmulowitz is more than my landlady. She’s my inspiration. Hell, she may be the best person I’ve ever known. All I need is a word. Just one word. Critical? Stable? What? I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you?”
The nurse sighed, tired of my badgering. “Mrs. Schmulowitz is in serious condition. We’d upgrade her to stable, but she insists on getting out of bed every hour to do leg-lifts.”
I thanked her and signed off, feeling as if one large rock had been lifted from me. Whatever lightness of being I felt lasted about as long as it took for my new, less-than-smart phone to ring. It was Savannah.
“You said you were going to call me.”
“True.”
“I waited, Logan, all night. Then I tried calling you. Because I was worried. Any idea how many times I tried calling? Go on, take a shot at it.”
“Many?”
“I stopped counting.”
“My phone died, Savannah. I had to get a new one.”
Was it the whole truth? No. But being a Buddhist is all about not hurting others. Telling Savannah all I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours would’ve only inflicted pain.
“I’m sorry you were scared, Savannah. I’m fine. I promise.”
She exhaled. “OK, apology accepted.” There was a pause, then she said, “I just miss you, that’s all.”
“I miss you, too, babe.”
There was a pause.
“You haven’t called me that in a long time,” Savannah said.
“What?”
“Babe.”
“It just sort of slipped out. Again, my apologies.”
“Don’t apologize. I like it.”
So much I wanted to tell her. That I ached for her. That I could do a better job, be a more thoughtful human being next time around. But I held back. The next step toward reconciliation was unconditional forgiveness. I was still working on that one.
“I talked to the hospital. Looks like Mrs. Schmulowitz is gonna make it.”
“That’s wonderful, Logan. She’s one of a kind. I hope your cat comes home, too. I know how much he means to you.”
“Why he does is beyond me.”
“I think it’s because you admire his sense of independence.”
“It’s not because of his selflessness, that’s for sure. It’s Kiddiot’s world. We just live in it.”
Savannah laughed. What I needed, she said, was a visit from The Cat Communicator, the reality television show Crissy Walker was hoping to produce at Animal Planet.
“My new client actually works at Animal Planet,” she said. “He’s having panic attacks over picking which shows to produce. He gets pitched hundreds of ideas every week.”
“I can see it now: the guy sits in climate-controlled comfort all day, sipping lattes and having people beg him to make their shows, then wigs out because he can’t decide between Monkeys Gone Wild and The Real Rodents of Orange County? I’m glad he’s not taking flying lessons. I don’t think he’d do very well.”
“Just because you’ve never had a panic attack, Logan, doesn’t mean they’re not real. They can be terribly debilitating.”
Only a minute earlier, I’d vowed to be a more empathetic human being. Now here I was, the same old insensitive me. Bad habits die hard.