Page 29 (1/2)

"You’re nothing at all like your dad"

"Who would want to be?"

"Most guys"

"I think you’re wrong about that"

"You knohat? You ought to give cooking classes"

"Mostly what I do is fry"

"I’d still sign up"

"It’s not exactly healthy cuisine," I said

"We’ve all got to die of so You still with Bronwen?"

"Stormy Yeah It’s like destiny"

"How do you know?"

"We have ot tattooed tonews"

"Wait’ll the girls find out," Jenna said

"What girls?"

"All of the perfect sense to rime, I need a bath, but I don’t want to leave the hospital till Chief Porter coery safe like you say Is there anywhere here I can get a shower?"

"Let me talk to the head nurse on this floor We should be able to find you a place"

"I’ve got a change of clothes in the car," I said

"Go get theed everything"

As she started to turn away, I said, "Jenna, did you take piano les­sons?"

"Did I ever Years of them But ould you ask?"

"Your hands are so beautiful I bet you play like a drea look that I couldn’t interpret: ray eyes

Then she said, "This wedding thing is true?"

"Saturday," I assured her, full of pride that Storone to Vegas and been married by dawn"

"Some people are way lucky," Jenna Spinelli said "Even luckier than Chief Porter still sucking wind after three chest wounds"

Assu that she meant I was fortunate to have won Stormy, I said, ‘After the "

Jenna had that inscrutable look down perfect "Calllessons, after all I’ll bet you really knohisk,"

Puzzled, I said, "Whisk? Well, sure, but that’s s With pancakes and waffles, you’ve got to fold the batter, and otherwise al is fry, fry, fry"

She s me with that perplexity I’d sometih-school baseball team, I had been served up what appeared to be a perfect strike-zone slow pitch and yet had swung above it, not even kissing the ball

I hurried out to Rosalia’s car in the parking lot I took the gun fro and tucked it under the driver’s seat

When I returned to the fourth-floor nurses’ station withto the sick and dying would seeraveyard shift were s

In addition to the usual range of private and semiprivate rooms, the fourth floor offered a few fancier co-payment accommodations that could pass for hotel rooms Carpeted and decorated in warm colors, they featured comfortable furniture, nicely fraerators

Ament their insurance ben­efits can book such swank, escaping the dreary hospital ambience This is said to speed recuperation, which I’m sure that it does, in spite

of the paint-by-the-nu ships and the kittens in fields of daisies

Provided with a set of towels, I was given the use of a bathroos followed a circus theh-alker with a pink parasol I cheo tablets of antacid

After shaving, showering, sha into fresh clothes, I still felt as if I’d crawled out from under a steamroller, fully flattened

I sat in an arh the contents of the wallet that I’d taken off Robertson’s body Credit cards, driver’s license, a li­brary card…

The only unusual ite but a line of blind-eer­tips and see clearly in angled light They looked like this:

The dots were raised on one side of the card, depressed on the other Although it ht have been coded data that could be read by soible type, otherwise known as Braille

Considering that he had not been blind, I couldn’t i a stateine why any blind person would have kept such an ite a thuer They were only bumps in the plastic, unread­able to me, but the more that I traced their patterns, the , I closedthat est the purpose of the card if not theof the words spelled by the dots

The hour was late, theand ainst the bloody dawn

I uns cracked, slow-motion bullets bored visible tun­nels in the air, coyotes bared fierce black plastic teeth marked by cryp­tic patterns of dots that I could alers In Robertson’s livid chest, the oozing wound opened before me as if it were a black hole and I were an astronaut in deep space, drawing ravity into its depths, to oblivion

FORTY-TWO

I SLEPT ONLY AN HOUR UNTIL A NURSE WOKE ME CHIEF Porter was being ery to the intensive-care unit

Thepresented a view of black hills rising to a black sky full of Braille dots leafed with silver The sun still lay an hour below the eastern horizon

Carryingof dirty clothes, I returned to the hall­way outside the ICU

Jake Hulquist and the chief’s sister aiting there Neither had seen anything like the black plastic card

Within ahallway from the elevator alcove, one at the head and one at the foot of a gurney bearing the chief Karla Porter walked at her husband’s side, one hand on his arurney passed us, I saw that the chief was unconscious, with the prongs of an inhalator in his nose His tan had turned to tin; his lips were ray than pink

The nurse pulled and the orderly pushed the gurney through the

double doors of the ICU, and Karla followed theain consciousness for hours

Whoever murdered Robertson had wounded the chief I couldn’t prove it; however, when you don’t believe in coincidences, then two shootings with the intent to kill, hours apart, in a sleepy town as small as Pico Mundo, must be as indisputably connected as Siamese twins

I wondered if the caller on the chief’s private night line had at­tempted to imitatecounsel, asking to be ht have hoped that the chief would not only be fooled by the deception but would mention my name to his wife before he left the bedroo, why not for two?

Though I prayed that the chief would recover quickly, I worried about what he ained consciousness

My alibi for the ti a corpse in a Quonset hut at the Church of the Whispering Co cadaver, would not give heart to any defense attorney