The night manager was severely overweight, but Bishop didn’t mind the extra pounds as much as the hair on her face. He’d never seen anything like it: her five o’clock shadow was worse than his. “She might be fat, but she’s efficient.”

Terry’s scowl deepened. “So? What are you saying?”

Bishop could tell by Terry’s tone that he’d said something wrong. But Patricia Skousen was efficient, so he didn’t understand why it would be a problem to acknowledge it. “She is good at her job, isn’t she?”

“She just fired me, you asshole! Do you think I want to hear that?”

Lyman couldn’t help bridling at Terry’s response. He’d been treated poorly, even cruelly at times, for most of his life, so that spiteful tone was a trigger for him. “I’m just saying that I’m surprised you were able to keep your job this long.”

“That’s exactly what I thought you were saying! God, it’s impossible to like you! You know that?”

The open hostility he sometimes encountered never ceased to amaze Lyman. His inability to understand emotional nuances put him at a disadvantage. He tried to compensate with his intelligence, but he’d never had any friends to speak of, and only two girlfriends, both of whom dumped him after only a few months. Nothing he did seemed to change the way people treated him, except his career, of course. He’d enjoyed the respect he’d earned through his cancer research, but Evelyn Talbot had stepped in to rob him of even that. “You don’t have to be so rude.”

“You think I’m the one being rude? I wasn’t getting by on what they paid me and now I got nothing! And you tell me I had it coming?”

Bishop used his good arm to pull himself up higher in the bed. “Do you think you did a good job?” he asked in confusion. “Were you even trying to do a good job?”

Terry shook his head. “You’re crazy. Just like the rest of the assholes in here. The point is, this place doesn’t pay shit, so no one else is going to do any better.”

“I agree with you there.” Cleaning a mental hospital wasn’t exactly what anyone would consider an ideal job. Some of the patients spread feces on the walls! Lyman had even observed some coprophagia since he’d been committed.

He shuddered at the pathogens that could be spread by human waste and the illnesses that could result—cholera, typhoid fever, E. coli. He didn’t belong in here, was glad to be getting out. “So how will you get by? Can you live on unemployment benefits?”

Terry shot him a dirty look as he grabbed the mop/bucket combo he’d wheeled in and started haphazardly mopping the floor. He was doing an especially poor job tonight, but, as Lyman had already said, he never did a very good one.

“You’re not going to answer me?” Lyman asked. “I didn’t mean any harm in what I said.”

“You never do. And yet you say the wrong thing. Over and over again.”