Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,36

a poker game. Take ninety-nine from a hundred, however, and you’re still left with one; just enough to persuade him to hang on to the bottle a little longer, and go back.

He glanced down at the yellow stickies, just in case. Flowers4U were terribly sorry, not a single chrysanthemum to be had this side of Nijmegen before Friday, so they were sending fifteen dozen white lilies instead, hope that’s OK. Oh, and Janine had called, didn’t leave a number, will call back.

Janine, he thought. That’s funny. I had a sister called Janine.

Janine. He shuddered so violently he nearly fell off his chair. Needless to say it could perfectly well be a totally different Janine, just as the skinny Max in the horrible YouSpace bar could be a totally different Max. He grabbed the yellow sticky, glared at it, turned it over and scrutinised the back. No, he hadn’t missed anything. Janine; neither a common nor an uncommon name; possibly, just possibly, his sister.

He thought about her. Blood is thicker than water; it’s also sticky, messy and frequently a sign that things aren’t going too well. Half reluctantly, he allowed his memory to present a medley of Janine’s most characteristic moments. Janine aged nine, using his computer and her father’s credit card to try and hire a professional assassin to kill her gym teacher; Janine aged fourteen, sad and angry because her boyfriend hadn’t found a gift of one of her teeth, drilled and hung on a silver chain, a specially romantic Valentine gesture; Janine going through her political phase at age seventeen, again using Dad’s card to buy ex-Soviet surface-to-air missiles to arm the Cockroaches Protection League; Janine, politely refused entry to her senior prom because of the axe imperfectly concealed in her corsage; Janine in her freak-religions era, in her full regalia as a priestess of Kali Ma; Janine, any age between nineteen and twenty-eight, in a plain white smock without pockets, swearing blind that this time she’d stay in the clinic and really get herself straightened out. Well, he thought. I do love my sister, really and truly; just not enough to want to be on the same planet as her, if it could be conveniently avoided.

And, if he wasn’t mistaken, she felt the same way about him; hence the injunction, the terms of which were such that if she’d left a number and he’d returned her call, he’d have been liable to spend the next ten years in jail. What, he couldn’t help wondering, might have induced her to change her mind? Not running out of money, because she knew he hadn’t got any. Besides, even when her brain was so monstrously infused with chemicals as to render her technically no longer human, she’d always been ferociously shrewd with her investments, so the chances of Janine having gone bust were Paris-Fashion-Week slender. But, if it wasn’t money, what the hell could it possibly be? And how could she possibly have found him?

Answer: it’s not Janine, just someone with the same name. Even so; just his rotten luck to be away from the desk when the call came through.

Max and Janine too; all the little vampire bats coming home to roost. Or (ninety-nine per cent probability) not. He made a conscious decision not to think about it, and accordingly spent the rest of his shift thinking about nothing else.

Janine didn’t ring the next day, or the day after that. He’d have known if she had, because he was on the desk from 7 a.m. to midnight both days –

“I’m really sorry,” Call-me-Bill had said, “but we’re short-handed right now, so we’re all having to pull double shifts until it’s all sorted out. You do understand, I’m sure.” By the end of the second day, he was pretty sure he did understand, and it was nothing to do with staffing levels, which were exactly the same as before – Call-me-Bill, Matasuntha and himself looking after two guests who put in an appearance roughly once every twelve hours; apart from that, he might as well have been on the Moon. The explanation, he was more or less certain, had to do with Call-me-Bill and Matasuntha wanting him pinned down at the desk while they searched for Pieter’s bottle.

Actually, he didn’t mind terribly much. He was right next to the phone, so he’d be there when Janine rang, and while he was on Reception he couldn’t sneak away into YouSpace, and when he got off shift all he wanted to do