"What if it is?"

"It sideswiped me out in the boonies a little while ago."

Luke shook his head. "No way. It's been sittin' here all day. Ain't that right, Corley?"

Corley missed a beat, then nodded his misshapen head. "Yeah. That's right. Here all day."

"Really?" Jack stepped over to the right front fender and ran his hand along the beige-streaked dent there. "I bet if the police compare the paint on these sc.r.a.pes to the paint on my car they'll come up with a perfect match."

He had no intention of getting the cops involved, but they didn't know that.

Luke's eyes shifted from the sc.r.a.pes, to Corley, to Jack. "What if it does? Don't prove nothin'."

"I think the cops will see it differently, and then I won't be the only one wanting to know why you tried to run me down."

"Somebody tried to run you down?" said a woman's voice behind him.

It was the girl.

"Do I know you?" Jack said.

She stuck out her hand. "My name's Semelee. What's yours?" Her dark eyes were alive with interest as she looked at him.

"Jack," he said as he shook her hand. Her skin was soft, like a baby's. He nodded his head toward Luke and Corley. "You connected to them?" He knew the answer but wanted to see how she'd respond.

"They're kin. You think they tried to run you down?"

"I don't know who was driving, but I know it was that truck."

Her expression darkened. "Oh, it was, was it?" She turned and glared at her "kin."

"Get in the truck."

Luke spread his hands. "But Semelee..."

"In the truck," she said through her teeth. "Now!" "Now!"

The two of them moved off like whipped dogs. If nothing else, Jack had learned who ruled the roost.

She was all smiles when she turned back to him. A nice smile. The first he'd seen. It lit up her face and made her almost pretty.

"I'm sure it was just an accident. Those boys drive a little crazy sometimes. Why don't I buy you a drink and we can talk it over. Maybe-"

"What were you doing in my father's room?"

"Your father?" Her brow furrowed. "I don't think I-"

"His hospital room. You were in it yesterday, wearing a wig and dressed like a nurse."

She snapped her fingers. "I knew knew I seen you before." I seen you before."

Yeah, right. She'd known him the instant she saw him.

"What were you doing there?"

"Oh, that. I been thinkin' bout becomin' a nurse, so I dressed up like one and went to the hospital to see what it was like. It didn't work out. Made me feel kinda sickish. I guess nursin' ain't for me."

"I guess it ain't."

Good story. It fit nicely with what he'd seen, but Jack wasn't buying a word.

She smiled again. "Now, about that drink...?"

He hesitated. A little face time with her and he might get a handle on what was going on between his father and Semelee and her "kin." But he had Anya back in the car and he hadn't seen his father yet today. But maybe he could catch her later.

"Have to take a rain check," he told her. "Got to get to the hospital."

"Oh, yeah. Your daddy. Is he bad sick?"

"He's been better."

Another battered pickup, this one blue, pulled up beside the first. For a moment he thought it was filled with migrant workers, but then Jack saw their misshapen heads and bodies. If they were any sort of workers, they looked like they might be extras for Wes Craven if he was doing a new sequel to The Hills Have Eyes The Hills Have Eyes. He recognized the marble-cheeked guy from the Publix. All the funny-looking street people he'd seen begging on his trip through town were gathered in these two trucks.

"Well," Semelee said, "we'll try for that drink some other time."

Jack tore his eyes away from the blue truck. "We sure will. When?"

"Whenever you want."

"How do I reach you?"

"Don't worry." Her smile broadened as she opened the pa.s.senger door of the pickup and climbed in. "Just say the word and I'll know."

Something in her tone sent an icy trickle down Jack's spine.

6.

Jack walked into the hospital room and froze just inside the door. His father, dressed in an open-back hospital gown with little booties on his feet, was sitting up on the edge of the bed eating a plate of green Jell-O.

"Christ! Dad...you're awake!"

His father looked up. He looked fresh and rested. He might have been sitting on his front porch having a gimlet.

"Jack? You're here? You?"

His blue eyes were clear and bright through his steel-rimmed gla.s.ses. His hair was damp and combed, his face looked freshly scrubbed. If not for the facial bruises and the bandage on the side of his head, there was no evidence that he'd been seriously hurt.

"Yeah. Me." He shook his head. "I can't believe this. Last night you were still level-seven coma and today..."

"They told me one of my sons had been visiting. I a.s.sumed it was Tom. But come to think of it, I seem to remember hearing your voice."

"I was talking to you a lot."

"You were? Maybe that's what brought me out. I couldn't believe you were here so I had to see for myself." He sighed and looked at Jack. "Is this what I have to do to get you to visit?"

"Such a thing to say!" Anya said, bustling around Jack and heading for the bed. She'd hung back at the doorway, making Oyv comfortable, she'd said, and had waved Jack ahead. "Be nice, Thomas."

"Anya!" his father said, eyes lighting at the sight of her. "What are you doing here?"

"Jack brought me. We've become fast friends." She took his right hand in both of hers. "How are you?"

"I'm fine. Better every minute, especially since they took that catheter out of me." He shuddered. "That's not something-"

"There she is!" said a heavily accented woman's voice. Jack turned and saw a thin little Hispanic woman, dressed like a nurse's aide, standing next to the hulking form of Nurse Schoch, pointing at Anya. "She's the one I told you about."

Nurse Schoch, looking as stern as ever, glanced down at the aide and spoke in a rumbling voice. "You want to tell me again what you saw?"

"I was in the bathroom, washing the sink, when she come in and hold his hand and say, 'Okay, Tom. You've been asleep long enough. Today's the day you get up.' That's what she say."

Anya laughed and waved a hand at her. "How do you know I don't say that to him every day?"

The little woman shook her head. "Right after she leave, he sit up in bed and ask me if he miss breakfast."

"Did I?" his father said, smiling. "I don't remember. I was a little groggy after I first woke up, but I'm fine now." The smile faded. "So many things I don't remember. They tell me I had an accident but I don't remember a thing about it."

The aide was still pointing at Anya. "Bruja!" "Bruja!"

Jack knew enough Spanish to know she was calling Anya a witch.

"Enough of that," Schoch said. "Go clean something. Git."

After one last fearful look at Anya, the little woman scurried off. Nurse Schoch stepped over to his father's side and took his blood pressure. She nodded and wrote on a clipboard.

"How am I doing?" he said.

"Fine." Schoch smiled and, surprisingly, it didn't break her face. "Amazingly fine. Dr. Huerta's coming up to see you."

"Who's he?"

"She. She's been taking care of you since you were brought in to the ED."

"Well, she'd better get here fast, because as soon as I finish this Jell-O, I'm going home."

Jack and Schoch began talking at the same time, telling him he couldn't, that he'd just had a serious injury, and so on and so on. Didn't faze him.

"I don't like hospitals. I feel fine. I'm going home."

Jack recognized the note of finality in his father's voice. He'd heard it as a kid. It meant Dad had made up his mind and that was that.

"You can't," Schoch told him.

He peered at her through his gla.s.ses. "I guess I'm a little confused. When did I become the hospital's property?"

Schoch blinked and Jack guessed no one had ever asked her that.

"You're certainly not the hospital's property, but you became its responsibility responsibility when you were wheeled through the doors." when you were wheeled through the doors."

"I appreciate that," he said. "Really, I do. And from the way I feel right now, you've all done a wonderful job. But I no longer need a hospital, so I'm going home. Where's the problem?"

"The problem, Dad...," Jack said, feeling his patience slipping. His father was acting dumb. "The problem is that you had a serious accident-"

"So I'm told. Can't remember a thing about it so I guess I'll have to take people's word for it."

"It happened," Jack told him. "I've seen the car. Totaled."

He winced. "Not even a year old." He shook his head. "I wish I could remember."

Jack watched his father's expression. Was that fear in his eyes? Was he afraid? Of what?

"That's not the point," he told him. "The point is you've been in a coma for three days and how do we know you won't lapse back into one in the next minute or hour or day?"

His smile was thin. "We don't. But if I do, you can bring me back here." He held out his arm-the one with the IV running into it-to Schoch. "Would you remove that, please?"

She shook her head. "Not without doctor's orders."

"Okay, then. I'll do it myself."

"Christ, Dad," Jack said as his father began peeling off the tape that held the line in place.

"All right, all right," Schoch said. "I'll take it out for you. Just let me get a tray."

As she lumbered out, Jack looked at Anya. She hadn't said a word through all this. He looked at his father who had lowered the top of his hospital gown and was peeling off the cardiac monitor leads.

"Can't you convince him?" he said to her. "I obviously can't."

Oyv popped his head out of her big straw bag as Anya shook hers. "I should be making his decisions? He's not crazy."

"He's acting crazy."

"He wants to leave the hospital because he feels fine. What's so crazy about that?"