CHAPTER 42

      I SLEPT ONLY AN HOUR UNTIL A NURSE WOKE me. Chief Porter was being moved from surgery to the intensive-care unit.

      The window presented a view of black hills rising to a black sky full of Braille dots leafed with silver. The sun still lay an hour below the eastern horizon.

      Carrying my shopping bag of dirty clothes, I returned to the hallway outside the ICU.

      Jake Hulquist and the chief’s sister were waiting there. Neither had seen anything like the black plastic card.

      Within a minute, a nurse and an orderly entered the long hallway from the elevator alcove, one at the head and one at the foot of a gurney bearing the chief. Karla Porter walked at her husband’s side, one hand on his arm.

      When the gurney passed us, I saw that the chief was unconscious, with the prongs of an inhalator in his nose. His tan had turned to tin; his lips were more gray than pink.

      The nurse pulled and the orderly pushed the gurney through the double doors of the ICU, and Karla followed them after telling us that her husband wasn’t expected to regain consciousness for hours.

      Whoever murdered Robertson had wounded the chief. I couldn’t prove it; however, when you don’t believe in coincidences, then two shootings with the intent to kill, hours apart, in a sleepy town as small as Pico Mundo, must be as indisputably connected as Siamese twins.

      I wondered if the caller on the chief’s private night line had attempted to imitate my voice, if he had identified himself as me, seeking counsel, asking to be met downstairs at the front door of the house. He might have hoped that the chief would not only be fooled by the deception but would mention my name to his wife before he left the bedroom.

      If an effort had been made to frame me for one killing, why not for two?

      Though I prayed that the chief would recover quickly, I worried about what he might say when he regained consciousness.

      My alibi for the time of his shooting amounted to this: I had been hiding a corpse in a Quonset hut at the Church of the Whispering Comet. This explanation, complete with verifying cadaver, would not give heart to any defense attorney.

      At the fourth-floor nurses’ station, none of the women on duty recognized the item that I’d found in Robertson’s wallet.

      I had better luck on the third floor, where a pale and freckled nurse with a fey quality stood at the station counter, checking the contents of pill cups against a list of patients’ names. She accepted the mysterious plastic rectangle, examined both sides of it, and said, “It’s a meditation card.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Usually they come without the bumps. Instead they have little symbols printed on them. Like a series of crosses or images of the Holy Virgin.”

      “Not this one.”

      “You’re supposed to say a repetitive prayer, like an Our Father or a Hail Mary, as you move your finger from symbol to symbol.”

      “So it’s like a convenient form of a rosary you can carry in your wallet?”

      “Yeah. Worry beads.” Sliding her fingertips back and forth over the raised dots, she said, “But they’re not only used by Christians. In fact, they began as a New Age thing.”

      “What’re those like?”

      “I’ve seen them with rows of bells, Buddhas, peace signs, dogs or cats if you want to direct your meditative energy toward the achievement of rights for animals, or rows of planet Earths so you can meditate for a better environment.”

      “Is this one for blind people?” I wondered.

      “No. Not at all.”

      She held the card against her forehead for a moment, like a mentalist reading the contents of a note through a sealed envelope.

      I don’t know why she did this, and I decided not to ask.

      Tracing the dots again, she said, “About a quarter of the cards are Braille like this. What you’re supposed to do is press a finger to the dots and meditate on each letter.”

      “But what does it say?”

      As she continued to finger the card, a frown took possession of her face as gradually as an image rising out of the murk on Polaroid film. “I don’t read Braille. But they say different things, this and that, a few inspirational words. A mantra to focus your energy. It’s printed on the package the card comes in.”

      “I don’t have the package.”

      “Or you can also order a custom imprint, your personal mantra, anything you want. This is the first black one I’ve ever seen.”

      “What color are they usually?” I asked.

      “White, gold, silver, the blue of the sky, lots of times green for the environmentalist mantras.”

      Her frown had fully developed.

      She returned the card to me.

      With evident distaste, she stared at the fingers with which she had traced the dots.

      “Where’d you say you found this?” she asked.

      “Downstairs in the lobby, on the floor,” I lied.

      From behind the counter, she picked up a bottle of Purell. She squirted a gob of the clear gel onto her left palm, put the bottle down, and vigorously rubbed her hands together, sanitizing them.

      “If I were you, I’d get rid of that,” she said as she rubbed. “And the sooner the better.”

      She had used so much Purell that I could smell the ethyl alcohol evaporating.

      “Get rid of it—why?” I asked.

      “It’s got negative energy. Bad mojo. It’ll bring wickedness down on you.”

      I wondered which school of nursing she had attended.

      “I’ll throw it in the trash,” I promised.

      The freckles on her face seemed to have grown brighter, burning like sprinkles of cayenne pepper. “Don’t throw it away here.”

      “All right,” I said, “I won’t.”

      “Not anywhere in the hospital,” she said. “Take a drive out in the desert, where there’s nobody around, drive fast, throw it out the window, let the wind take it.”

      “That sounds like a good plan.”

      Her hands were dry and sanitized. Her frown had evaporated along with the alcohol gel. She smiled. “I hope I’ve been of some help.”

      “You’ve been great.”

      I took the meditation card out of the hospital, into the waning night, but not for a drive in the desert.