She rolls her eyes and flips her hair off her shoulder.
Patricia returns with two glasses of water and passes them to me and the shrew. Then she takes a seat on the couch opposite of me.
“You probably want to ask why we're here,” I say to get the ball rolling.
Patricia looks between us, eyebrows arched. The question must have slipped her mind. To be fair, she thought I was going to kill her so that probably took priority.
“Silvia and I figured you would know why Karl donated one and a half million dollars to a hospital.
Patricia's mouth pulls into a frown on one side. “That … was the payoff.”
“Now we're getting somewhere.” I settle back against the couch. “What was he paying off?”
She sighs and meets my gaze.
“Karl and I … disagreed. He paid off the hospital to file false reports so my license would be revoked.” Her frown deepens. “It worked, of course.”
Silvia scoffs. “That's not how Daddy handles disagreements.”
“She has a point. I would know.” I grimace at all that implies.
“For so long, I thought he was going to send … ” Patricia looks down at her hands.
“Me,” I say for her.
She nods but doesn't raise her head. “It's been almost two years, and I've concluded he either hasn't reached me on the list … metaphorically. Maybe literally. Or, he's afraid.”
Silvia straightens. I'm sure implying Karl fears anything is highly offensive to the Walker clan. She is daddy's little demon, after all.
Patricia's lips tighten. “When I applied for the job at the mansion, I thought it was a great opportunity. Private care for a rich family. That's unusual for a doctor. I thought I would be taking care of elderly relatives. Things like that. But that's not what it was like at all. I wasn't taking care of the family so much. I was taking care of … others.”
“Hostages,” Silvia says without any emotion at all.
I look at her, and my stomach churns. She elicits that response more and more from me.
Patricia shudders. “There was so much blood sometimes.”
I shove down the images because I had a hand in that mess. Still do. Guess that answers what happens to my prisoners. At least some of them.
“I don't understand how the infirmary works,” I say. “You just stayed at the mansion for when Karl needed you to stitch back up his prisoners?”
“Not exactly. It was me and another doctor. We rotated the on-call schedule. I worked in a hospital ER to fill in when I wasn't on-call for Karl.” She looks at me. “But sometimes we had to stay at the mansion, for days or even weeks at a time. Either when a … hostage … was being interrogated. Or when you were … away.”
“So, you're saying Karl kept a doctor on site during a wish. That way, if I got capped, he could summon me back to the mansion and get me fixed up?”
She nods.
“Considering what he sends me out to do, that's not a surprise.” I shift in my seat, both anticipating where this conversation is going to lead, and worried. “So, what was the fight about?”
“The vault,” she says.
“Karl has a vault?”
I must know next to nothing about the Walker estate. Then again, the Tent City jail is probably a more inviting place to hang out.
“Yes, a vault. About the size of a beer fridge.” Patricia starts picking at her nails. “It contains … uh, DNA.”
“My DNA,” I say, though I'm not entirely sure what this all means yet.
“Well, not really your DNA … ” Patricia doesn't look up from her nails. “Your father's, technically.”
I study her, trying to make sense of her words.
“Karl wanted to bring the jinn story into the twenty-first century. If something happens to you, the blood line is lost.” She finally looks at me. “He kept backup.”
“Like, stem cells?”
“No … ” She glances around the room, at nothing particular, just to avoid looking at me. “Stems cells wouldn't exactly work. He wanted to. . grow a test tube genie baby, if something happened to you before you … ”
My brain tries to wrap around what she is saying, but every angle seems perverted and overall kind of gross. Well, now I know where Silvia gets it from.
I say it outright, because Patricia isn't going to and I can't believe I fully grasp the situation: “Karl Walker is storing a mini-vault of genie baby batter because he's pretty sure I'm not going to survive long enough to procreate.”
She tightens her expression, then settles her gaze on me and nods.
“He does realize I'm twenty-three, right?”
She just stares at me.
“That aside, would a test tube genie even work?”
She shrugs. “He's the first to try it. Guess he feels like he didn't have much of a choice.”
Anger wells until my fingers are scratching the arm of the couch. “Well, if I'm so fuckin' incompetent he could just not send me to do his dirty errands.”