Ritual Magic

of the week it is most times. Denise thinks his poor, pickled brain is malfunctioning worse than usual tonight, and maybe it is, but that’s not saying much.”
    “I’m here, so I might as well see him.” And touch him. That was the quickest way to know for sure if Festus Liddel was victim fifteen.
    “I’ll take you to him,” Denise said. “You can see what you think, but he is not his usual self.”
    “What kind of unusual is he?”
    “You’ll see.” Denise came out from behind the counter and started down a well-scrubbed aisle between examination cubicles separated by curtains. A Spanish-speaking family were clustered in the first one, spilling partly out into the aisle, all of them talking at once. “He’s this way, down at the end. Hardy’s with him.”
    “The message I got said your patient didn’t know what year it is.”
    “He thinks it’s 1998. To be fair, his memory’s always iffy, so I understand why Hillary thinks I shouldn’t have called you.”
    “That’s exactly the sort of memory problem I need to know about. I’ll need to talk to that doctor—the attending?” Lily searched her tired brain and couldn’t come up with the name. “He won’t be happy that you called me, I take it.”
    Denise snorted. “Plackett doesn’t want us to take a piss without his say-so.”
    In the next cubicle a baby cried, thin and sad, in his mother’s arms. The mother looked about fifteen and exhausted. They passed an emaciated young man with gang tats being hooked up to an IV, an old man on a heart monitor, and a middle-aged couple exchanging worried words in what sounded like Vietnamese.
    “I ought to tell you about Hardy,” the nurse went on. “
I
don’t think there’s anything wrong with his cognition.” Her defensiveness suggested that others did. “But he can’t communicate normally. He was beaten real badly several years ago, see. Brain damage.”
    They had to stop and move aside to let an enormously obese woman make her way slowly down the hall with the aid of a walker, breathing heavily. She wore two hospital gowns—one to cover her backside and one her front—and a look of grim determination. As the woman struggled by, music arrived. Harmonica music.
    It was a hymn of some sort. Lily knew that much, even if she couldn’t put words to it. Lily had been exposed to religion as a child, but the battle between her parents over which faith system their daughters would be raised in—Christian or Buddhist—had made her decide to opt out of the whole subject. She’d been studious in her inattention whether dragged to church or to temple, and eventually her parents dropped the subject, too.
    The woman beside her obviously recognized the song. She was humming along, smiling. “That Hardy,” Denise said as the obese woman finally passed them. “He can sing most anything—well, old songs, anyway. I never heard him sing any of the newer ones. But he only ever plays the same three hymns on that harmonica of his—‘Blessed Assurance,’ ‘Amazing Grace,’ and ‘In the Garden.’ We hear those over and over. He does a real pretty job with them, though.”
    Blessed Assurance.
That was what the hymn was called. Mildly satisfied with having put a name to it, Lily followed the nurse to the last cubicle on the right.
    The small space held two men. The one in the bed was white, unshaven, and scrawny, with a potbelly and mouse-colored hair. His eyes had the yellow tinge of a failing liver. The one standing beside the bed was over six feet tall and gaunt, though muscle lingered on his wide shoulders. His skin was unusually dark, the kind that takes on a bluish tinge under fluorescent lights, and his hair was grizzled. He wore a faded flannel shirt and baggy gray pants. He, too, could have used a shave.
    “This is Agent Yu,” Denise announced. “She’s with the FBI.”
    “The FBI,” the man in the bed said in a marveling way. “Imagine that, Hardy. That pretty girl is with the FBI.”
    The other man lowered his harmonica to look at her in delighted surprise, as if they were old friends but he hadn’t expected to run into her here. “‘I’ll be calling you . . . ooo,’” he sang. “‘You will answer true . . . ooo.’” His voice was deep and true, but rough. Maybe the beating that damaged his brain had included a blow to his voice box.
    “It’s mostly songs with Hardy, see,” Denise said. “Sometimes rhymes, but songs are easiest for him. Music is stored