“I’m not his accomplice. I don’t know anything.” She looks at me dubiously. It occurs to me that I may be getting favorable treatment from Dr. Zandipour precisely because she does think that. I take a different tack. “Let’s pretend for a second that I don’t know anything that he has done in Iraq. Tell me.”

“The same thing he has done for the art of just about every other country on earth that doesn’t attend the G-8 summits.”

“What’s that?”

But she doesn’t tell me. She just swats me playfully, as if I had authored a witticism.

For the first time in my life I’m grateful to be in the presence of a Rat Burglar nut. Even though she doesn’t really seem like a nut. She seems like a smart, beautiful, great-smelling woman. One who may be flirting with me because she thinks I’m associated with the Rat Burglar.

One who is helping deceive the cops because of that association.

“So you’re helping me because you think I work for...”

“I don’t owe any loyalty to the art police. My first and only responsibility is to the health of my patients. Now, can you repeat those three words for me?”

“Cowboy,” I say. “Um...”

“Are you certain?”

“I think so. Cowboy, and then, ah...”

“It’s important that you’re certain of your answers because if you cannot correctly repeat those three items then I cannot consider you alert and oriented. Under those circumstances I could not approve any questioning. So concentrate on your answers.”

“Oh,” I say, getting it. “Fire truck . . . giraffe . . . soda pop.”

Even though I don’t utter the correct third word, I think it, and “sailboat” brings me painfully back to real life. I have no Clean Getaway, no career, no Charlie. Even if I manage to hobble out of the hospital somehow, I’ll be a fugitive. I have no family to hide me. I’m too broke to start a new life in some Central American country. I have plenty to run away from, but nothing to run to.

What’s the point?

Then I remember the point: Deke.

If I don’t give him a sizable chunk of change real soon he is going to do something awful to Charlie. And it will be my fault. Herk would kill me if he could hear this, but: I still love her. I can’t help it. And no matter what she’s done, and with whom, I can’t let anything happen to her. I don’t know how I’ll find the money, but I know I won’t find it in a jail cell.

“Doc, I’ve got to get out of here,” I say. “Like pronto.”