The call was a loser, she already knew. Another time, without Wendy the Step-Witch breathing down her neck, she would have cut this potential client loose without another thought. He couldn’t tell her when his accident had occurred, and if he’d been hit by one of the local independent cab companies, whose insurance companies were notoriously shady, they’d have no case. But Wendy didn’t need to know that. For now, she just needed to get Wendy off her back. The way to do that was to keep Marty Sommers talking.

“I see,” Drue said, nodding her head encouragingly. “Head-on collision? What were your injuries?”

“Well, uh, I banged up my knee, busted my lip. Smashed the hell out of my cell phone. And it was only a year old, ya know? If nothing else, that taxi company needs to buy me a new phone…”

Wendy showed no sign of retreating to her office, so Drue kept going, winging it. She clicked yes on the boxes of the referral form, the one that would be forwarded to the big man himself, if enough yeses were checked. In reality, the box she’d just checked should have been a no. A hell, no.

“Oh wow.” Drue clucked her tongue sympathetically. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Sommers. That sounds incredibly painful. And the emergency room noted all those injuries on your discharge forms?”

“Call me Marty, okay? Now, what was that you asked about the hospital?”

She repeated herself, speaking even more slowly this time. “When you were released from the emergency room, were your injuries noted on the discharge papers? Did you keep those documents?”

“Oh yeah. That piece of paper they give me? See, I don’t think anybody wrote that on anything. Like I told the nurse there, I just needed something for the pain. Like, a prescription for Oxy? My knee was swole up something awful.”

“Do you think you can find your discharge papers, Marty? It’s kind of important.”

Wendy made a show of tapping her shoe. Tap. Tap. Tap. She poked Drue’s shoulder with a long pink acrylic nail, then twirled her forefinger in the air, the signal that Drue should wrap up this call.

“Oh my gosh!” Drue’s eyes widened in feigned horror. “Shattered pelvis? Broken clavicle? Concussion? Have you regained vision in that eye yet?”

“Nobody said nothin’ about a shattered pelvis,” Marty said. “And I can see pretty good. My head does still hurt, though. Like I said, I really think some Oxy would help a lot. I mighta thrown the emergency room paper away. They treated me like I was some kinda drug addict or something.”

“Very disturbing,” Drue said, clicking all the yes boxes on the intake form. “And you’ve been out of work for how long?”

“Well, I’m actually not working right at the moment. See, my tools got stolen outta my truck a couple months ago…”