"When you do, you call us. Kemper or me. Got it?"

"I want to go home and take an aspirin," said Kurtz. Trying to put just a bit of whine in his voice.

"Sorry. The docs want to keep you here another day. Your clothes and wallet have been… stored… until you're ready to travel." She started to leave.

"Rig?" he said.

She paused, but frowned, as if not pleased to hear him use the diminutive of her old nickname.

"I didn't shoot O'Toole and I don't know who did."

"All right, Joe," she said. "But you know, don't you, that Kemper and I are going on the assumption that she wasn't the target That someone was trying to kill you in that garage and poor O'Toole just got in the way."

"Yeah," Kurtz said wearily. "I know."

She left without another word. Kurtz waited a few minutes, got laboriously out of bed—hanging onto the metal railing a minute to get his balance—and then padded around the room and bathroom looking for his clothes, even though he knew they wouldn't be there. Since he'd ignored Nurse Ratchet's bedpan jar, he paused in the toilet long enough to take a leak. Even that hurt his head.

Then Kurtz got the IV stand on wheels and pushed it out ahead of him into the hallway. Nothing in the universe looked so pathetic and harmless as a man in a hospital gown, ass showing through the opening in the back, shuffling along shoving an IV stand. One nurse, not his, stopped to ask him where he was going.

"X ray," said Kurtz. "They said to take the elevator."

"Heavens, you shouldn't be walking," said the nurse, a young blonde. "I'll get an orderly and a gurney. You go back to your room and lie down."

"Sure," said Kurtz.

The first room he looked in had two old ladies in the two beds. The second had a young boy. The father, sitting in a chair next to the bed, obviously awaiting the doctor's early rounds, looked up at Kurtz with the gaze of a deer in a hunter's flashlight beam—alarmed, hopeful, resigned, waiting for the shot.