Ah, that was an incoming call. I slithered a hand into the narrow space between us and withdrew my phone from my front pocket. Martybeth craned her neck to whisper hotly in my ear, “Don’t answer it.”

  “I have to,” I said. “It might be …” Well, I had no idea who it might be. I half hoped it was Allie, discomfiting though it would be to be caught with this hand on my cookie jar. I glanced at the caller ID.

  It was Woody!

  Only … it wasn’t. As I answered the phone, I heard a woman with a South Asian lilt to her voice say, “Could I please speak to Mr. Hooverlander?”

  “I’m Mr. Hoverlander,” I said, correcting her on the fly.

  “Sir, my name is Dr. Ablasa. I wonder would you happen to know a …” I could hear the flutter of paper, as of pages being turned. “Schyler Colfax?” She butchered that handle, too, pronouncing it shyler instead of skylar. I knew the name, but as it belonged to a man more than a century dead, I doubted that’s the one she meant. I also understood that just as my taste in aliases ran to foreign iterations of no smoking, Woody’s apparently ran to obscure U.S. vice presidents.

  “This Colfax person,” I said. “How would he know me?”

  “Well, your number was in his phone. Would you please look at his picture, sir? I’m sending it to you now.” A moment later, Woody’s photo appeared on the tiny screen of my cell phone. He looked distracted, absent, damn near feral. “He says you’re his son. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. That’s great,” said the doctor. “Sir, are you in Las Vegas?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your father has been giving us a rather confusing story of his circumstances. Would it be possible for you to come here, sir, to the Blue Hills Center?”

  “Blue Hills Center, huh? Okay, text me the address.” I looked at Martybeth and essayed a sheepish smile of What can I do? “Medical emergency,” I said.

  “So it would seem,” she said, sullenly repacking her breasts.

  “I can’t help it. I have to go.”

  “There’s still more to the tour. I haven’t shown you everything.”

  Nor would she. The moment had broken. There would be neither hanky nor panky between the thousand-count sheets today.

  On the drive to Blue Hills, I called Vic and had him do a Google hop on the facility. It turned out to be a treatment and recovery clinic, mostly for teens with depression or adults with drug problems. I couldn’t imagine how Woody’d ended up there until Vic said, “It’s a 5150 joint.”

  “Ah,” I said, “now that makes sense.”

  A 5150 is the California Welfare and Institutions code under which a person can be held on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric watch. By association, a 5150 joint is a bedlam sort of place; a loony bin. You could call a bar or a party a 5150, or even your own home on a bad day. I wondered if Woody had abruptly and completely unspooled. It made my heart ache, for getting locked up on a 5150, or whatever it’s called in Nevada, was the sort of big trouble I wouldn’t wish on anyone, even my problematic old man.

  But when I ran this sympathetic scenario past Vic, he just laughed, then bellowed in Uncle Joe’s voice, “The chump is in the how-oose!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a Slurpee,” he said. “How could it not be?” Slurpee was grifter cant for a fake fit or seizure one throws to deter an attack or advance a scheme.* It’s a useful trick, and one no doubt to be found in Woody’s bag of same. Of course, it would have to be an extreme Slurpee to result in a 5150, and what could have eventuated that need? Well, I’d know soon enough, for I’d reached the southern Las Vegas suburb of Anthem, and the Blue Hills Center appeared in the middle distance, sandwiched between a golf course and the dusty cobalt mounds that, I suppose, gave the center its name. It seemed like a pretty place, quiet and placid by Vegas standards. Not a bad spot to stage a recovery. Or a staged recovery.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Meantime, how’s your planning going?”

  “Awesome,” he said, and stepped out his scheme for taking Vegas by storm.

  “Sounds ambitious,” I said when he finished. “Are you sure you can handle it? You could scale it back some and still—”

  “It’s handled, Radar. Don’t worry.” The confidence in his voice shook me, but I shook it off. We quickly reviewed our respective task lists, and then I let him go.

  I was just driving onto the grounds of Blue Hills when a big black Song Segue shot past me going the other way, spewing a blue cloud of imperfectly combusted hydrocarbons. The Segue was the largest SUV in the Song product line, a favorite, in the armored variant at least, of tinhorn dictators and drug kingpins worldwide. This one was an overpowered beast with compression struts and blackout windows, and it damn near put me off the road as it barreled by. I aired my objection with a muttered, “Asphalt,” but the Segue was already well past me, hurtling back toward town. It amused me to speculate who might be bundled in back. Some rock star with a blow problem, or a Strip headliner desperately trying to hold his shit together between shows. Then I mentally replayed my glimpse of the driver. Did I see a flash of red behind the wheel?

  I suddenly had a sick feeling in my stomach.

  Five minutes later, my foreboding bore out when Dr. Ablasa, a studious young Bangladeshi in a lab coat pantsuit, greeted me in her office with the perplexing news, “Your father just left with you.”

  “I’m pretty sure he didn’t,” I said.

  “No, I mean not you, obviously, but someone claiming to be you.”

  “You didn’t ask for ID?”

  “Well, you were expected.”

  So I was. But who knew that? Recalling my phone conversation with Dr. Ablasa, I realized that I’d named Blue Hills in front of Martybeth. Whom had she told, and why?

  “Mr. Hooverlander …”

  “It’s Hoverlander,” I said, with some exasperation.

  “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but I’m sure you can understand—”

  “Look, let’s not worry about that now,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me how he came to be here?”

  “Well, that information is confidential. From a legal standpoint—”

  “From a legal standpoint”—I let my voice go cold and hard—“you just turned my father over to somebody who wasn’t me. I’m thinking confidentiality might not be your key issue right now.” I suppose she agreed, because she opened a folder on her desk and studied its contents.

  “Do you want to read it?” she asked.

  “Summarize,” I said.

  Woody had arrived at the facility two nights prior, courtesy of Metro PD. According to the cops who handed him off, he’d made a scene in a pizza restaurant, a scene of the indecently exposive sort. As a result, he’d been apprehended, questioned, determined to be “a threat to himself or others” and dumped here, per Blue Hills’ contract with Clark County. Upon intake, he’d presented as troubled, jumpy, disoriented, and, as his interview proceeded, increasingly hostile. The intake doc postulated that he had Pick’s disease, but as this cannot be definitively determined short of autopsy tests on the brain, a conclusive diagnosis would have to wait. He certainly showed the symptoms, including memory loss, impaired speech, impaired motion, apathy, antipathy, and abrupt mood swings. But there was nothing on that list a competent grifter couldn’t fake.

  “Did he get better during his stay?” I asked.

  “Well, it was only two days.”

  “Granted,” I said. “But did he improve?”

  Dr. Ablasa cast her mind back over the previous forty-eight hours. “He did seem more relaxed,” she conceded. “Though that may be a function of reduced stimulation. We pride ourselves on our tranquil environs.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said. “I’m sure it’s all bubble-gum trees and rainbows out here. But why did it take you two days to call me?”

  “We, ah, we misplaced his cell phone.”

  “I see. And when you told him I was coming for him?”

  “He brightened considerably. I think he’s quite fond of you.”

  “Was he still happy when the fake me showed up?”

  She let her head drop. “No. No, he … well, he became agitated.”

  “I would, too, if I were being shanghaied.” Dr. Ablasa started to bluster a protest, but I put up my hand to belay her. “Never mind,” I said. “Just tell me about the guy who took him. What did he look like?”

  Now the doc looked truly grim, and the single word she uttered, “Nondescript,” rang so pathetically false that I actually felt bad for her.

  “You didn’t see him, did you?”

  “I was busy back here,” she said. “The front desk handled your father’s release.”

  “Then let’s talk to the front desk.”

  But by the time we got out there, the incipient shitstorm had sent everyone running for cover, so that the only person remaining at reception was a skinny Honduran orderly who kept saying, “No inglés, no inglés.” I queried him in Spanish, and he surrendered a terse description—hombros grandes, sin cuello—then fled through security doors labeled STAFF ONLY.

  Big shoulders, no neck. Could that be anything but one of Wolfredian’s sidewheels? Not with a redhead in the driver’s seat. They’d snatched Woody right out of his self-contrived protective custody.

  And I’d told them where to find him.

  Shit.

  I was out the door and halfway down the front steps when Dr. Ablasa came running after me to give me Woody’s cell phone. I asked her why she hadn’t given it to Woody’s “real” son, but she just gave me this pained look, like Please don’t sue us too bad. I let it go. Right now a rehab center’s free-range incompetence was the least of my worries. The most of my worries was Wolfredian’s decision to escalate things from business arrangement to bag job. The other night he’d been content to let me bring him a whale and help him render it. What had changed?

  I sat in my car awhile, ruminating. What if my online evidence hadn’t held up? Maybe Jay’d made Mirplo as a fabricat, and this was his ungentle way of saying so. But what good did that do him? If Mirplo’s not the real deal, then I’m empty-handed, and snatching Woody is pointless. More likely it was the other way around. He bought Mirplo’s bona fides but didn’t trust that I’d make good. We Hoverlanders were demonstrably no Boy Scouts, so you could now view Woody as a lien against delivery. Or maybe Wolfredian was just jacking up the pressure on general principle. Con artists do this all the time. It’s called rushing the mark, and it makes people act rashly.

  Woody’s phone rang, and I jumped at the sound, an odd, flat, blooting ringtone. I glanced at the caller ID.

  Allie.

  The phone kept going bloot, bloot.

  I couldn’t bring myself to answer.

  *So called, I’m told, for being conducted in front of the Slurpee machine at your local 7-Eleven while your compatriot merrily shoplifts through the diversion.

  21

  Bloot

  Bloot!

  When I was five or six, Woody took me to a carnival. I spent an instructive hour on the midway as he explained how the different games were gaffed, and how the carny barkers preyed on emotions of greed, pride, arrogance, or fear to separate the rubes from their rubles. Later, my lesson complete, he let me go on the Gravitron, one of those centrifugal force rides where you spin around and around in a circle real fast and then the floor drops out. That’s how I felt when I saw Allie’s name on Woody’s caller ID. I’d been going around in circles, and now the floor’d dropped out.

  Bloot!

  Allie was calling Woody? What could it mean? The obvious explanation spoke to me in a cowboy voice—“Them two’s in cahoots!”—but my poor addled brain couldn’t accept that, and correspondingly grasped at a series of ridiculous straws. Like, maybe she hit a wrong speed dial, though why would she have him on speed dial or even have his number at all? Okay, then, she got his number from Mirplo, and she’s calling Woody to reach me because I’m not answering my phone. Sure, fine, except that my phone’s right here, forlornly unrung. Then how about this: Allie surrendered her phone number when she broke up with me (so I couldn’t phone-stalk her, right?) and whoever got it next, they’re the ones who dialed by mistake. Yeah, that’s plausible. Right up there with “phone snatched by aliens to study our primitive technology.” Plus, her name came up, not her number. That means her number’s been stored in his phone. Why? And for how long?

  Face facts, cowboy. Them two’s in cahoots, and pro’ly done bin from the git-go.

  Bloot!

  In a split instant I retraced everything that had passed between Allie and me about Woody. There were inconsistencies, I had to admit. At first she’d wanted me to build a filial bridge, then she wanted me to cut him loose. Next we pretended to break up, but then we broke up for real. Whose idea had it been for Allie to go trapdoor spider? Hers, yes? So now I’m thinking maybe she was trapdooring for the other side.

  Bloot!

  But why would she do that? For that matter, how? How would she have hooked up with Woody in the first place? Intercepted one of his jackalope postcards and reached out to him with a scheme to squeeze off my half of the California Roll? Had that been her goal all along? I thought she loved me. Maybe she just loved the money, and it offended her deep-rooted grifter’s sensibilities that she didn’t have the whole roll. All that talk about leopards and spots, was it all just bafflegab in the end?

  Bloot!

  Okay, what was I going to do about this phone call? Let it go to voice mail? Maybe she’d leave a message, something incriminating or enlightening. But what if she didn’t? Nuck it! I thought, channeling Vic. I want to know what’s what.

  Bloot!

  I flipped open the phone and emitted a guttural grunt.

  “Woody? Is that you? It’s Allie.” So much for snatched by aliens. “Woody, are you there?”

  I thought I might keep mum, give her a chance to give something away, but I found I couldn’t do it. It was Allie. I couldn’t not talk to her any more than I could not breathe.

  “It’s not Woody,” I said.

  “Radar? Oh, my God.” The line went dead.

  Hmm, that didn’t work so well. Now what?

  Bloot!

  It was Allie again. I answered again.

  “Radar, it’s very important that I speak to your father.”

  “Why?”

  “It just is. Please put him on.”

  “Interesting choice of words, sunshine. Who’s putting who on? Who was putting who on from the jump?”

  “Radar, please let me talk to Woody.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Not there? It’s his phone.”

  “Uh-huh. And he and his phone have become separated.”

  “Separated how?”

  “One of them got hijacked.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  I read concern in her voice, though not shock, as if Woody being snatched was dismaying but not exactly headline news. That’s what I read, but it wasn’t like I could trust any of my reads anymore. Hell, that could have been Allie in a red wig behind the wheel of the Segue. Anything was possible now.

  Allie, meanwhile, had lapsed into the contemplative silence of processing and evaluating new data. After a moment of this, she said, “Radar, I’m going to hang up. Star-69 me. I’ll let the call go to voice mail. Enter my code”—she rattled off some numbers—“and listen to the saved calls.”

  The line went dead again. I star-69’d her. When her outgoing message kicked in, I punched in her code, and a mechanical female voice said, “You have no unheard messages and four saved messages. Press 1 to replay saved messages. Press 2 for other options.”

  I pressed 1, and heard Woody’s twice telephone-filtered voice say, “Hey, it’s me. A large problem just pulled up outside my place. I’m gonna try to beat it out the back door, but if I don’t succeed, that’ll mean Jay’s holding an ace, so be aware.” I heard the distant sound of pounding on a door, then the call ended.

  “Second saved message,” said the voice-mail gal.

  Against a background of street sounds and wind, I heard Woody say, “Me again. I got halfway away, but they’re following me. Okay, I see some stores up ahead. I’m gonna try to get arrested.” I could hear tension in his voice, but not panic. He seemed, on some level, to be enjoying himself. Well, he would. He’s a grifter. We live for this shit.

  “Third saved message.”

  “Sir,” I heard a stranger’s muffled voice say, “please take your hands out of your pockets.”

  “What?” said Woody, muffled at first, but then suddenly clearer. “It’s not a gun. See? It’s just a cell phone.”

  “Now if you’ll just calm down, I’m sure we—”

  “I don’t have any concealed weapons. I don’t have any concealed anything!”

  “Sir, please don’t remove your—”

  I heard a clunk and the line went dead. Apparently he’d dropped his phone along with his pants.

  “Fourth saved message.”

  There was a preamble of ambient noise, including some indistinct radio chatter. Then I heard Woody, muffled again, saying, “Look, you have to believe me, I was faking back there. I’m not a head case. Really, I’m not.”

  A male voice, young, but full of authority, said, “Just relax, sir. We’re gonna take you someplace where they can look after you. Get you the help you need.”

  “I don’t need help! I told you, I was faking. Some guys were after me, so I—”

  “Got naked in a pizza joint? That seems like a strange response.”

  “I had to get away!”

  A second voice said, “And I have to get laid, but try telling my wife.”

  After a little more fruitless back-and-forth, the line went dead.

  “You have no unheard messages. Press 1 to replay saved messages. Press 2 for other options.”

  Other options. Well, what were my options? Leave a message? Tell Allie how hurt and angry I was? Ask if she’d been off disporting with Real Estate Greg when these calls came in? There didn’t seem to be much point to that. Okay, then maybe I’d take the high road and just tell her I loved her. Again, not much point. Sometimes the truth is just the most useless card in your deck. I tried to imagine a scenario where her and Woody’s alliance wasn’t anything but a betrayal, but if it was out there, it escaped me. It crossed my mind to wonder if Real Estate Greg wasn’t a beard of some kind, and the true object of Allie’s affection was a certain vintage model Hoverlander. Could she and Woody be having an affair? The idea was so dismaying that I had to dismiss it. Otherwise my head would explode.