McCaleb watched it hover in the black sky until it finally escaped by slipping behind the clouds somewhere out over Catalina. As good a hiding spot as any, he thought, as he looked down at the empty coffee cup in his hand. He missed being able to sit in the stern at the end of the day with an ice-cold beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But cigarettes had been part of the problem and were gone for good now. And it would be a few months before the medication therapy would relax enough to allow a dose of alcohol into the mix. For now, if he had just one beer, it might give him what Bonnie Fox called a fatal hangover.

McCaleb got up and went into the boat’s salon. First he tried sitting at the galley table but soon got up, turned the TV on and started flipping through the channels without really looking at what was on. He turned the tube off and checked the clutter on the chart table but found there was nothing for him there, either. He moved about the cabin, looking for a distraction from his thoughts. But there was nothing.

He moved down the stairs into the forward passageway and into the head. He took the thermometer from the medicine cabinet, shook it and dipped it under his tongue. It was an oldstyle glass tube instrument. The electronic thermometer with digital reading display the hospital had provided was still in its box on the cabinet shelf. For some reason he didn’t trust it.

Looking at himself in the mirror, he pulled open the collar of his shirt and studied the small wound left by the morning’s biopsy. It never got a chance to heal. There had been so many biopsies that the incision was always just about covered with new skin when it was opened up again and the artery probed once more. He knew it would be a permanent mark, like the thirteen-inch scar running down his chest. As he stared at himself, his thoughts drifted to his father. He remembered the permanent marks, the tattoos, left on the old man’s neck. The coordinates of a radiation battle that served only to prolong the inevitable.