"Nah, grabbed my arm, but that's all. You remember that older man in the class, the one we were wondering about? He was in the lobby, too, waiting for me to come back. He stopped Nunley, and the guy from the desk sent him on his way. Then he told me some interesting information. The only thing is, after that I got a hell of a headache, so I took some medicine and dropped."

"How's the leg?"

One problem often triggered another. We'd been to maybe ten doctors, and they all said that my problems were psychological—whether or not we told them about the body-finding thing. "The effects of a lightning strike are over when you leave the hospital afterward," one particularly pompous jackass had told me. "There are no well-documented long-term effects." Sadly, the problems I had with the medical community were common among lightning strike survivors. Very few doctors knew what to do with us. For some of us it was much harder—the ones who couldn't go back to work and were trying to get workmen's comp or disability payments, for example.

At least I didn't have tinnitus, which affected so many survivors, and at least I hadn't lost my sense of taste, another common problem.

"The leg's a little shaky," I admitted, feeling the muscle weakness as I tried to achieve a leg lift. Only the left leg rose. The right one just quivered with the effort. Tolliver began to massage it, as he often did on the bad days.

"So, tell me the interesting information about the man from the class."

"He's a private detective," I began, and Tolliver's hands stopped moving for second.

"Not good," he said. "At least, depending on his goal."

I tried to recall everything Rick Goldman had said to me, and Tolliver listened to it all with absolute attention.

"I don't think this really has anything to do with us," Tolliver said. "He may not believe you're a genuine talent, but since when did that matter? Lots of people don't. He just hasn't needed you yet. As far as the board of trustees, or whatever, you've already been paid a retainer by the college. It wasn't much, anyway. This was more for the good buzz than anything else."

"So you don't think Goldman can hurt us?"

"No. And why would he?"

"He didn't seem really angry or upset," I admitted. "But he might think we were defrauding the college."

"So, what's he gonna do about it? He's not the guy who writes the checks. We were hired to do something, we did it."

I felt a little better about Rick Goldman after that, and I decided not to think about Clyde Nunley any more, though I knew Tolliver had a slow burn going about the professor being rough with me. Maybe we wouldn't run into him again. To change the subject, I asked Tolliver how his Beale Street jaunt had gone.