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Fuck are you?"
    "Sure, I'm Bubba," I said, though even as I said it I felt some echo of the uselessness that Kenny Lukens had felt in lying to this guy.
    "Fuck are you?" he said again. "That fuck Mickey send you?"
    "What fuck Mickey?"
    He didn't answer. His eyes slid off me and strained upward toward a nurse call button on the wall behind him. His arm slowly lifted, dragging tubes and needles. I blocked it with my body and leaned down low. Rumor has it that cancer isn't catching; still, it was creepy bringing my face close to the foul breath of this dying stranger. "Okay. I'm a friend of Kenny Lukens, Lefty. Remember Kenny Lukens?"
    Ortega's hand dangled in midair. Pulse showed through the thin skin of his temples. "Cocksucker," he whispered.
    "He's dead, Lefty. Went to dig up what he stole from you, got killed."
    The dying owe no homage to the dead, and Ortega wasted no sympathy on Kenny's passing. He just gurgled and scrambled till he was almost sitting up. IV bottles swung like bells and clunked together. "The pouch? You have it? I pay you."
    "Whoever killed him has the fucking pouch."
    Ortega just panted through the harness on his nose, his eyes as wild as the eyes of a cornered horse.
    I suddenly realized I was not only frightened and appalled, but angry; I still don't know exactly why. Maybe because any death drags you back to thoughts of every other, all the helplessness and lack of resignation. I grabbed him by the arms. "What the fuck is so important with that pouch that Kenny Lukens died for it?"
    Ortega didn't answer.
    I think I shook him. "Who's Mickey?"
    Nothing.
    "Who put the pouch in the safe? Kenny said it was a woman. What woman, Lefty?"
    His mouth twitched, his cracked lips quivered and split deeper. Disgusted to find his bony shoulders in my hands, I let them go. He fell back against his pillows. Oxygen was squeaking in his nose; or maybe it was my own breath, coming hard. The graph of his heartbeat was tracing out a jagged range of hills.
    His eyes stayed on my face as he reached slowly once again toward the call button. I did nothing to stop him. I was paralyzed. I watched him watching me, and I digested the horror of having touched him. Wheezing, straining, he used up the slack of the tubes in his arms. The button was farther than the tubes would stretch. He kept reaching for it anyway. The tape that held the needles in his veins started pulling back from his purplish-yellow skin; it made a sound like ripping silk and left behind a residue of gummy dots. The needles appeared to be bending in his flesh like spoons in unripe melon. A syringe pulled free with a muffled pop and a small spout of brownish blood gushed out of Lefty's forearm.
    Dizzy, nauseous, I wheeled out of the room.
    The monitor started beeping, screaming at my back. I'd just made it to the elevator when a clot of doctors and nurses went hurrying by in the opposite direction, scrubs and lab coats rustling behind.

6
    Back home , I went not for the Sancerre, not for the Vouvray, but straight, and with an unsteady hand, for a jumbo hit of grappa.
    Great, I thought—one hour of playing detective and already I'm reaching for the hard stuff in the middle of the afternoon. How much longer before I sank to swilling the crappy bourbon out of paper cups?
    I paced awhile, drinking, trying to forget the hospital, trying not to picture the mayhem of the docs convening over Lefty's bedside, stabbing to replace the pulled-out needles, poking to sedate his ravings, hammering his chest to get his insides back on beat. Awful and familiar images of care as violence, violence as procedure.
    Desperate for distraction, I went to the music room. I scanned the wall of disks, pondered, hummed, and could find nothing that I felt like listening to, not one symphony or song I believed would succeed in carrying me away.
    This happened once or twice a year, and engendered in me a subtle, simmering dread. If alcohol and music lost their power to soothe me, what the hell