“I am but I had a flat.” I filled him in on my stop for lunch, wondering how far I might have gotten driving on a tire with a nail driven into it. No point in worrying about it now, so I moved on. “How’s Felix doing?”

“Not well. He developed a clot on his brain, so they had to go in and operate. Now it looks like he’s fighting some sort of secondary infection, which is more bad news.”

“Is he going to make it?”

“Hard to know. William swears he’s on his way out.”

“William thinks everybody’s half dead. What do the doctors say?”

“They don’t seem optimistic. It’s not what they say; it’s the look in their eyes,” he said. “I’ll be glad to have you home. What time do you think you’ll get in?”

I checked my watch again. It was now 1:22. “Not for another couple of hours.”

“Why don’t you plan on having supper here? You’ll be tired and you’ll need a glass of Chardonnay.”

“Sounds good.”

We were winding up the conversation and I was close to hanging up when he said, “Oh! I almost forgot. Your friend Dietz is on his way down from Carson City. He says he should be here by six, so I invited him for dinner, too.”

I could feel myself squint. “Dietz? What’s he want?”

“I guess there’s a problem with that job referral.”

“Job referral?”

“That’s what he said. I figured you’d know what he was talking about.”

“I have no idea.”

“You can ask him yourself when he gets here,” he said.

And with that, he hung up.

23

Naturally, the rest of the trip was uneventful and the miles flew out behind me at warp speed. Just when I longed for a delay (a minor car wreck, perhaps, or a sudden bout of the runs that would have me getting off the highway at every other exit lest I mess my underpants), there was no such luck in store. Feeling crabby and out of sorts, I brooded about Ethan Dace hammering a nail into my tire and then, as if I wasn’t sufficiently annoyed, I took a little trip down memory lane, summing up my relationship with the aforementioned Robert Dietz.