Spiral

not the sutures torn.”
    ”It wasn’t a swimming pool, Doctor. I was playing pool.” She frowned. ”And you did this pushing a little ball with a stick?”
    ”My opponents didn’t like the way I kept score.”
    The doctor began threading a needle. ”Perhaps if you watch what I am about to do, you will next time choose a different game.”
    ”I’ve already made that decision, thanks.”
    The tired smile reappeared, joined by the concentration a professional brings to bear on what must be a tiresome task.

    I drove back to my hotel to drop off the bloodied jacket. Carrying it folded over my arm as I crossed the lobby, my clerk friend Damon called out from the desk.
    ”Mr. Cuddy, I have something for you.”
    When I walked over to him, he caught a better look at my jacket. ”Oh, God! You’re hurt again?”
    ”I’m fine, Damon. What’ve you got?”
    He handed me a simple number-10 business envelope, sealed but with no markings other than ”Cuddy, J.” scribbled on the back.
    ”Who left this?”
    ”I don’t know,” said Damon, still eyeing my stained sleeve. ”I was registering a guest, and that just kind of plopped on the counter. A man said, ‘For John Cuddy,’ so I wrote your name on it.”
    ”You wrote?”
    Damon nodded as his phone began to ring.
    I said, ”What did the man look like?”
    ”Sorry, never looked up from helping the guest.”
    Damon lifted his receiver, and I used a nearby letter opener to slit the envelope. A single sheet of copy paper came out, creased in threes.
    When I unfolded it, there were differently sized letters cut from newspaper headlines or magazine advertisements, pasted on the page like an old-fashioned ransom note. Only the message was a little different:

    AsK The bAnD
    abOuT SuNDy MoRAn

    Hanging up his phone, Damon said, ”Is everything all right, Mr. Cuddy?”
    ”I doubt it.”

    Up in my room, the phone-message dome was blinking. When I dialed for voice mail, the electronic announcer said I had one new call, which turned out to be Duy Tranh, returning mine about the hospital bill and specifying curtly when he’d be available for me to reach him. I felt that tingling in the back of my head again, but what was causing it just wouldn’t come to mind. Then again, the doctor had told me that my memories might fade in and out, so I pressed the buttons for Tranh’s number.
    ”Hello?”
    ”Mr. Tranh, John Cuddy.”
    ”You have been remiss in—”
    ”That hospital bill. You got called by the credit card company about a charge on the one you’d given me, right?”
    No reply.
    I said, ”Thanks for your concern. I’d like to see the Colonel sometime soon.”
    ”One hour,” said Tranh, hanging up on me before I could disagree with him.

    Nicolas Helides was sitting in the stern of the big sailboat moored behind his house. A gangplank went from its deck to the dock, probably to allow him to get on and off using the aluminum brace. He faced toward the Intracoastal and away from the glass wall to the internal portion of the pool. Where Duy Tranh had found his granddaughter.
    As I reached the bottom of the gangplank, I could see the Skipper was alone, a blanket over his legs, the brace leaning against a seat cushion in the cockpit. A white motor yacht at least a hundred feet long cruised by slowly, with—and I had to look twice—a helicopter on its uppermost deck.
    I thought Helides was focused only on the passing yacht before he said, ”Lieutenant, that’s fifteen million of materiel going by, not counting the whirlybird.”
    I stopped. ”You recognize my footsteps?”
    The good hand rose from his lap, a portable phone in it. ”Umberto called me from the gate.” A change of tone as the hand came down again, the wake from the yacht rocking his sailboat like a child’s cradle. ”I understand from Duy that you had some sort of... medical problem.” I climbed the gangplank. ”You might want to hear about the cause of it.”
    He looked at my bandaged arm as I sat in the cockpit across from him. ”Please.”
    I summarized my barhopping with Mitch Eisen, being jumped by Ford Walton outside the hotel, and my visit to the Homicide Unit after the hospital stay.
    The Skipper said, ”And what have you found out about this... prostitute?”
    I described my trip to the trailer park and roadhouse. Helides actually smiled. The half of his mouth that the stroke didn’t prevent from smiling. ”A bar brawl. Like the old days, eh?”
    I thought back to Saigon,