As I started down the ramp, someone called, “Mr. McCall, oh, Mr. McCall.” I turned to see a man striding toward me along the quayside, briefcase dangling from one hand, BlackBerry clutched in the other. His name was Blake Darling and he claimed to be a real estate broker. He was as slick and slippery as he looked in his natty yellow jacket. Ignoring him, I started down the ramp again.
“Wait, sir, please,” he called. “Just a moment of your time.”
“I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Darling,” I said. “Nothing has changed. I wasn’t interested in selling yesterday, I’m not interested today, and I won’t be interested tomorrow. Neither are any of my neighbours. Give it up. You’re only wasting your time, and your client’s money.”
“I never waste either,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and grated on the ear like feedback from a cheap guitar amp. “Time is money, as they say. Feel free to ask any of my clients if they’ve gotten their money’s worth. My list of satisfied clients is quite long.”
“You’re becoming a nuisance,” I said. “Some of my neighbours are talking about applying for a restraining order against you.”
“They’d just be wasting their time,” he said.
“Look, why can’t you get it through your head that none of us is interested in selling our shares in Sea Village?” Which was the only way to acquire a house moorage, as there was no room to expand along the quayside.
“My client is a very determined man, Mr. McCall. He usually gets what he wants.” He chortled and smiled, as if at some secret joke. “He didn’t get to where he is today by taking no for an answer. Neither did I.”
“Well, I hope he — and you — can handle the disappointment,” I said. “But even if someone was willing to sell, your client, whoever he is, would likely never be approved by the board, of which we are all members. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, Mr. Darling, anyone who’d hire someone like you to represent him isn’t the kind of neighbour we want.”
“There’s no need to be rude about it.”
“Nothing else seems to have worked.”
“You haven’t heard the latest offer.”
“I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter. Go away.”
“It’s a very good offer,” he said.
“Whatever it is,” I said, knowing it was pointless to try to get the last word, “it won’t be good enough.”
“How will you know until you hear it?”
“Good day, Mr. Darling.” I turned and walked down the ramp to the floating docks.
“I won’t give up, Mr. McCall,” he called out to my back.
I wondered if Loth was available for part-time security work.
“You think this Loth character might be the one who attacked Bobbi?” Greg Matthias said quietly. We were in Bobbi’s room. She was out of intensive care, but still in a coma and hooked up to an IV pump and monitors. She was in a semiprivate, but the other bed was unoccupied.
“Detective Kovacs asked me if we’d pissed anyone off lately,” I said. It wasn’t until my encounter with Loth that afternoon that I’d remembered Bobbi tearing a strip off him at the Public Market a few weeks before; he’d been making fun of a wheelchair-bound little person named Francis Peever, who taught at the Emily Carr Institute. “Loth looked like he was ready to kill her before Mabel and Baz arrived to break things up. And he strikes me as the kind who might hold a grudge.”
“Does he strike you as the kind who would send a woman made up like Marilyn Monroe to lure you to the marina in order to beat the living daylights out of you?”
“Well, no, when you put it that way,” I conceded.
He scratched a note in his book. “We’ll check him out.”
On the bed Bobbi whimpered and stirred, setting off a flurry of bleeps from the machines, then lay still and quiet again. Presently, the machines settled down again, too.
“The doctors say that’s a good sign,” Matthias said.
“I hope they’re right.”
I’d been thinking about what Mary-Alice had said. I was reasonably certain I wasn’t in love with Bobbi, but I was also reasonably certain that I couldn’t be absolutely certain I wasn’t. Naturally, because Bobbi was a very attractive woman, in a wholesome girl-next-door kind of way, I’d entertained the possibility of a romantic relationship, but I’d never considered it very seriously for very long. In point of fact, I suspected that if I suggested it, in all likelihood Bobbi would laugh, which would tend to dampen my enthusiasm.
There was no doubt in my mind, however, that I would be equally willing to throw myself in front of a bus to save her as I would to save my daughter Hilly, Mary-Alice, or even my former spouse, Linda. (I hoped it would never be necessary, particularly in Linda’s case; she’d just think I was trying to weasel out of paying child support.) As I looked down at Bobbi lying in that hospital bed, battered and bruised and comatose, I also knew for a certainty that if whatever or whoever was in charge of the particular dimension of reality in which we lived offered me the opportunity to change places with her, I’d do it in a nanosecond. From the expression on Greg Matthias’s face, I suspected he would, too.
I just didn’t want to marry her.
Or have Norman Brooks for a father-in-law.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded as he came into Bobbi’s room. “I thought I told you not to come around last night.”
“You didn’t, as a matter of fact,” I said. “You told me to leave. Not the same thing at all.”
“Well, I’m telling you now. Get out and don’t come back.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Get him out of here,” he barked to Matthias.
“I think Bobbi would want him here,” Matthias said.
“I don’t give a fuck what you think,” Brooks snapped back. “I don’t want him here.”
“Then I guess you don’t care what Bobbi thinks, either,” I said.
Brooks’s face clouded with rage. Matthias took my arm. I shook his hand off.
“What the hell is your problem?” I demanded.
“You are,” Brooks snarled. “I don’t like you …”
“I get that,” I said. “But why? What did I ever do to you?”
“You’re a punk. You and the kind of people you associate with. You damn near got my daughter killed.”
“That’s not —” I was going to say he wasn’t being fair, that it wasn’t my fault that Bobbi had been hurt, that it could have just as easily been me lying in that hospital bed, but Matthias gripped my arm again.
“Let’s go,” he said, giving my arm a brief squeeze for emphasis. There was no shaking him off this time.
Outside Bobbi’s room I said, “I’m getting damned sick of that guy.”
“Look, let’s go have a beer,” Matthias said. “How about that place near where you live? Bridges. I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast. I hear they do good burgers.”
So we got in our respective vehicles and drove to Granville Island. Bridges was busy, but we were able to find a seat on the terrace overlooking the marina. From where we sat we could see the Wonderlust. We could also see the point under the Burrard Street Bridge where Bobbi had been found. Neither of us spoke, except