She’d wrapped herself in some sort of psychedelic kimono which made her skinny figure seem even thinner. She looked like a Rainbow Pop that had been left out in the sun too long.

“Woo-woo,” Jack said.

It was the best he could do on such short notice.

Dinner turned out to be as idiosyncratic as the chef. She mixed up a wok of walnuts, peanuts, peas, jalapeño peppers, and corn seasoned with, among other things, ashes falling from her ever-present cigarette, all rolled up in big flour tortillas. Despite Jack’s initial reservations, the mélange proved very tasty.

“Can I hazard a guess that you’re a vegetarian?” he said.

They were into their second magnum of Côtes du Rhone. Anya kept refilling his glass, and Jack noticed that she was putting away two or three glasses to every one he had, but showing no effects.

Anya shook her head. “Heavens, no. I don’t eat vegetables at all. Only fruits and seeds.”

“There’s corn in this,” Jack said around a mouthful. “Corn’s a vegetable.”

“Sorry, no. It’s a fruit, just like the tomato.”

“Oh. Right.” He remembered hearing that somewhere. “Well, how about the peas?”

“Peas are seeds—legumes. Nuts are seeds too.”

“No lettuce, no broccoli—?”

“No. Those require killing the plant. I don’t approve of killing. I eat only what a plant intends to discard.”

“What about Oyv?” He glanced at the little Chihuahua chowing down on something in his bowl. “He needs meat.”

“He does perfectly well on soy burgers. Loves them, in fact.”

Poor puppy.

“So I guess if I stop by with a craving for a bacon cheeseburger—”

“You can just keep on going, hon. There’s a Wendy’s not too far down the road toward town.”

Gia would be right at home here, Jack thought. She wasn’t a vegan or anything, but she’d stopped eating meat.

Whatever. This dish was delicious. Jack wound up having four burritofuls.

He helped clear the dishes, then Anya brought out the mahjongg tiles, saying, “Come, I’ll teach you.”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“Don’t be afraid. It’s easy.”

She lied.

Mahjongg was a four-person game played with illustrated tiles, but Anya was teaching him a two-player variant. The images on the tiles swam before his eyes—circles, bamboo stalks, ideograms that were supposed to represent dragons or the four winds—while terms such aschow andpong andchong searched for purchase in his brain. He didn’t have any references for this stuff. Why couldn’t the tiles have spades and hearts or jacks and queens and kings?

The constant stream of smoke from the chimney that was Anya didn’t help. Neither did her plants. They seemed to be watching the game, like a gaggle of curious spectators crowding around a high-stakes poker table in Las Vegas. One strand of vine with broad green and yellow leaves kept falling off a palm frond and draping across his shoulder. Jack would put it back, but it wouldn’t stay up.

“That’s Esmeralda,” Anya said.

“Who?” Jack replied, thinking she was referring to some new tile or rule in the game.

“The gold-net honeysuckle behind you.” She smiled. “I think she likes you.”

“I’m not fond of clingy women,” he said, reaching once again to remove the vine from his shoulder. But when he saw Anya’s frown he changed his mind and let it stay where it was. “But in this case I’ll make an exception.”

She smiled and Jack thought, Sweet lady, but nut so, nut so, nut so.

In addition to the green, leafy distractions, all the wine he’d consumed wasn’t exactly helping his learning curve. Anya lifted the bottle—she’d opened a third magnum—to give him a refill. Jack put his hand over his glass.

“I’m flagging myself.”

“Don’t be silly, hon. It’s not as if you have to drive home.”

“I have something I want to do tonight.”

“Oh? And that would be…?”

“Just getting some answers to a few questions.”

“Answers are a good thing,” she said. Her voice was clear, her hand steady as she refilled her glass almost to the rim. No doubt about it: The woman had a hollow leg. “Just make sure you’re asking the right questions.”

12

Even in his slightly inebriated state, Jack had no trouble entering the clinic. All it took was a flat-head screwdriver from his father’s toolbox to pop the window lock and he was in.

He’d managed to extricate himself gracefully from the mahjongg lesson with a promise to return for another real soon. He wasn’t big into board games, although he’d playedRisk a lot as a kid. He liked video games, though. Not so much the first-person shooters that were mostly reflexes; he did well in those but preferred role-playing games that involved strategy. He liked trying to outwit the designers.

After leaving Anya’s he’d gone back to his father’s place and doused himself with a mosquito repellent spray he’d found on a shelf with the tennis racquets and balls. Then he’d walked around some to clear his head and get the lay of the land. Here it was 9:30 and no one was out. This was good. An occasional car drove by but he’d duck into the bushes as soon as he saw its lights. One set of lights had turned out to be a cruising security patrol jeep.

A couple of times he’d stayed in the bushes longer than he had to because of the faint feeling that he was being watched. He couldn’t find a trace of anyone following him, though, and wrote it off to his being on unfamiliar ground.

He’d approached the clinic building from the rear, where there was less light, and held his breath as he lifted the window, ready to run in case it was armed with an alarm system he hadn’t spotted. But nothing sounded.

Made sense when he thought about it. Why spring for the extra expense of alarming all the buildings when you had a real live security force manning the gates and patrolling the streets?

He crawled through, closed the window behind him, and began searching about. He used the penlight he’d found in his father’s top drawer, flicking it on and off as he moved. He found the small file room to the right of the receptionist area. He’d been hoping it would be windowless, but it wasn’t, so he had to search the files with his penlight.

Again that feeling of being watched, but he was the only one here. He sneaked to the window but saw no one outside.

A few minutes later he found his father’s slim chart. Holding it in his hand, he hesitated before opening it. What was the bad news Dr. Harris had been hiding? He knew the question—did he want the answer?

Again, the matter of his father’s privacy. The information inside could be pretty intimate. Did he have a right to peek this far into the man’s life?

Probably not. But the guy was in a coma, and Jack needed answers.

Taking a breath, he opened the file and flipped through it. He found two pages of lab test results. He didn’t know what all these numbers meant but noted that the “Abnormal” column was blank on both sheets. Good enough. An EKG had a typewritten reading at its top: “Normal resting EKG.” Even better.

But hadn’t Dr. Huerta said something about his father developing an abnormal rhythm in the hospital? Maybe from the stress of the injuries. Everyone had heard of the patient with the normal EKG who has a heart attack on the way out of the doctor’s office.

He checked the handwritten notes but couldn’t read much of Dr. Harris’s scribbling. The last entry was fairly legible though.

Reviewed labs w pt. All WNL. Final assess: excellent health.

Excellent health. Well, that was a relief.

But damn it, doc, why couldn’t you have just said so in the first place? Would have saved me a whole lot of trouble.

13

Jack fished the house key out of his pocket as he walked down the slope toward his father’s place. The good news was that the man was in excellent health. The bad news was that Jack didn’t know one damn thing more than he had when he woke up this morning.