Blowback (The Nameless Detective) (23 page)

I wish I'd been able to tell all that to Erika, I thought.

Then I thought: I wonder if she's still here in San Francisco, still free of attachments? And if she is, would she want to see me after all these years? Well, it might be worth the effort to find out. I've got the perfect reason to call her, after all—tomorrow I'll be fifty years old, and no man should have to spend his fiftieth birthday alone.

Maybe I
would
try to call her, then. Maybe I would.

And I turned off Grant onto Geary, parked illegally in a bus zone in front of the building where Dr. White had his offices, and went in to find out at last if the lesion was malignant or benign …