“You do that,” I managed. “I think I’ll just nap for a while.”
My eyelids were growing heavy. I could feel myself drifting. The din of recovery room noise retreated, and just that quickly, the blonde was back at my bedside, sitting on a rolling stool that seemed to appear and disappear like magic at the same time she did. The cascade of swinging hair still shielded her face, and she was still filing her nails.
I’ve had recurring dreams on occasion, but not very often. Most of the time it’s the kind of thing where something in the dream, usually something bad, jars me awake. When I go back to sleep, the dream picks up again, sometimes in exactly the same place, but a slightly different starting point can lead to a slightly different outcome.
This dream was just like that. I was still in the bed in the recovery room, but Mel was gone and so was my nurse. Everyone else in the room was faded and fuzzy, like from the days before high-def appeared. Only the blonde on the stool stood out in clear relief against everything else.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
She didn’t look up. “You said you’d never forget me,” she said accusingly, “but you have, haven’t you?”
I was more than a little impatient with all the phony game playing. “How can I tell?” I demanded. “You won’t even tell me your name.”
“My name is Monica,” she answered quietly. “Monica Wellington.”
Then she lifted her head and turned to face me. Once the hair was swept away, however, I was appalled to see that there was no face at all. Instead, what peered at me over the neck of the maroon sweatshirt was nothing but a skull, topped by a headful of gorgeous long blond hair, parted in the middle.
“You promised my mother that you’d find out who did it,” she said. “You never did.”
With that she was gone, plunging me into a strange existence where the boundaries between memory and dream blurred somehow, leaving me to relive that long-ago time in every jarring detail.
CHAPTER 2
WHEN IT COMES TO BORING, nothing beats second watch on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a time when nothing much happens. Good guys and bad guys alike tend to spend their Sunday afternoons at home. On a sunny early spring day, like this one, the good guys might be dragging their wintered-over barbecue grills out of storage and giving them a first-of-the-season tryout. The bad guys would probably be nursing hangovers of one kind or another and planning their next illegal exploit.
Rory MacPherson was at the wheel of our two-year-old police-pursuit Plymouth Fury as we tooled around the streets of Seattle’s Central West Precinct. We were supposedly on patrol, but with nothing much happening on those selfsame streets, we were mostly out for a Sunday afternoon drive, yakking as we went.
Mac and I were roughly the same age, but we had come to Seattle PD from entirely different tracks. He was one of those borderline juvenile delinquent types who ended up being given that old-fashioned bit of legal advice: join the army or go to jail. He had chosen the former and had shipped out for Vietnam after (a) knocking up, and (b) marrying his high school sweetheart. The army had done as promised and made a man out of him. He’d come home to the “baby killer” chorus and had gone to work for the Seattle Police Department because it was a place where a guy with a high school diploma could make enough money to support a wife and, by then, two kids. He had been there ever since, first as a beat cop and now working patrol, but his long-term goal was to transfer over to the Motorcycle unit.
Mac’s wife, Melody, stayed home with the kids. From what I could tell from his one-sided version of events, the two of them constantly squabbled over finances. No matter how much overtime Mac worked, there was never enough money to go around. Melody wanted to go to work. Mac was adamantly opposed. Melody was reading too many books and, according to him, was in danger of turning into one of those scary bra-burning feminists.
From my point of view, letting Melody go out and get a job seemed like a reasonable solution. It’s what Karen and I had decided to do. She had been hired as a secretary at the Weyerhaeuser corporate headquarters, but we had both regarded her work there as just a job—as a temporary measure rather than a career—because our ultimate goal, once we finally got around to having kids, had been for Karen to stay home and look after them, and that’s what she was doing now.