“It doesn’t matter that we don’t have the videotape we planted on the Nakamura job,” she says. “We don’t need it. We have you on a traffic cam at Eighty-sixth and Lex on the night of the break-in at Schermer’s, carrying the shovel. We have the shovel from the parking garage. You’re done, Starks. You’re hog-tied. Your only chance at a sentence recommendation is to tell us where the Rat Burglar is. And where the Nakamura sword is. Every minute counts, Starks. So start talking.”

I try to voice my outrage and confusion—what tape of the Nakamura job? what traffic cam? and what the hell do you mean, the Rat Burglar got away with the Nakamura sword?— but my mouth is glued shut with dried spittle, and my facial muscles are mostly unresponsive. When I move my mouth it only sneers uselessly, an expression I hope is obscured by the breathing mask on my face. Taking the only defensive action of which I am capable, I close my eyes and try to think thoughts unrelated to hard time.

She again shakes me ungently. “Starks, get up, damn it.”

An angry female voice comes to my rescue. Deciding that ostrichism is the better part of valor, I keep my eyes closed.

“Doctor, you don’t understand—”

“Step away from my patient immediately, please.”

“Otto Starks has—”

“I said you could wait for Mr. Starks outside of his room. Outside. When he’s stabilized and alert and oriented, you can speak to him. Not before.”

“I have a warrant for his arrest, Doctor.”

“Unless that warrant says you can kill him, you’re just going to have to wait.”

I can almost hear Nunes’s jaw muscles popping.

“When can he be moved?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was awake just a moment ago.”

“I doubt that, Detective. He hasn’t had any muscle movement since admission.”

“Otto Starks is an accomplice to the Rat Burglar. Every minute that I can’t talk to him the Rat Burglar gets farther away.”

“Who’s the Rat Burglar?”

“Put it this way. Otto Starks has helped steal over thirty million dollars’ worth of art. And he’s the only one who can bring in the thief.”

“I don’t know anything about a Rat Burglar, and I don’t know much about police interrogations, but my guess is that a dead subject won’t do you much good.”

“Doctor Zandipour—”

“I also doubt that the kind of answers Mr. Starks could give you right now would be very useful. If you were to ask him two plus two he’d very likely tell you ‘spaceship.’ ”

“I have very simple questions to ask him.”

“They’re just going to have to wait. Even if he were A and O, which he isn’t, he couldn’t do much talking. His lungs are busy with the respirator right now.”

A gristly moment of silence ensues.