“Isn’t it bliss?” he sang.

“You brought me here for a reason,” I said.

“Don’t you approve…”

“Why did they die, Alec?” I said.

“One who keeps tearing around…” His voice was thin and high. “One who can’t move…”

“Inmate Hardiman—”

“So send in the clowns…”

I looked at Dolquist, then at Lief.

Hardiman wagged a finger at me. “Don’t bother,” he sang, “they’re here.”

And he laughed. He laughed hard, his vocal cords booming, his mouth wide and spittle forming at the corners, and his eyes even wider as they remained on me. The air in the cell seemed to go into that mouth with him, as if he were sucking it down into his lungs until it filled his whole body and we’d be left airless and gasping.

Then his mouth clamped shut and his eyes glazed and he looked as reasonable and gentle as a small-town librarian.

“Why did you bring me here, Alec?”

“You’ve tamed the cowlick, Patrick.”

“What?”

He turned his head, spoke to Lief. “Patrick used to have an awful cowlick near the back of his head. It stuck out like a broken finger.”

I resisted the urge to raise my hand to my head, pat down a cowlick I haven’t had in years. My stomach felt weak suddenly and very cold.

“Why’d you bring me here? You could have spoken to a thousand police officers, a thousand Feds, but—”

“If I claimed my blood was being poisoned by the government or that alpha waves from other galaxies were infiltrating my faculties or that I’d been forcibly sodomized by my mother—what would you say to that?”

“I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Because you know nothing, and none of those things are true, and even if they were, it would be largely irrelevent. What if I told you I was God?”

“Which one?”

“The only one.”

“I’d wonder how God got Himself locked up in the joint and why he couldn’t just miracle His ass out.”

He smiled. “Very good. Very glib, of course, but that’s your nature.”

“What’s yours?”

“My nature?”

I nodded.

He looked at Lief. “Are we having the baked chicken again this week?”

“Friday,” Lief said.

Hardiman nodded. “That’s good. I like the baked chicken. Patrick, it was a pleasure meeting you. Drop by again.”

Lief looked at me and shrugged. “Interview’s over.”

I said, “Wait.”

Hardiman laughed. “Interview’s over, Patrick.”

Dolquist stood up. After a minute, I did too.

“Doctor Dolquist,” Hardiman said, “say hello to Queen Judith for me.”

Dolquist turned toward the cell gate.

I turned with him, stared at the bars, and felt them holding me, closing me in, blocking me from ever seeing the outside world again, locking me in here with Hardiman.

Lief walked up to the gate and produced a key, all three of us with our backs to Hardiman now.

And he whispered, “Your father was a yellow jacket.”

I turned around and he was staring at me impassively.