'Got a horse shot over in Alton, in South Carolina. Thought I'd drive over and have a look. You want to ride along?'
'Yes.'
'Pick you up in 'bout fifteen minutes.'
I was standing in front of the motel by the lobby door when Becker pulled up in a black Ford Crown Victoria. There was a blue light sitting on the dashboard, and a long buggy whip antenna, but no police markings. When I got in, the car smelled of food. Becker was drinking coffee. On the seat beside him was a large brown paper bag.
'Got us some sausage biscuits,' Becker said, 'and coffee. Help yourself.'
He pulled the car away from the motel and out onto the county road.
'What about granola?' I said.
'Have to go over to Atlanta for that,' Becker said. 'People in Columbia County don't eat granola and don't tolerate those who do.'
I poured a little container of cream into a paper cup full of coffee and stirred in several sugars. I drank some, and fished out a large biscuit with a sausage patty in the middle.
'Okay,' I said. 'I'll make do.'
'Figured you'd eat most things,' Becker said.
'What about the horse shooting?'
'Stable over in Alton, Canterbury Farms, somebody snuck around their stable last night, shot a filly named Carolina Moon.'
'Dead?'
'Don't know,' Becker said. 'Just picked it up off the wire. Got no jurisdiction, you know, over in South Carolina.'
'Me either,' I said.
'Hell, you got no jurisdiction anywhere,' Becker said.
'It's very freeing,' I said.
I drank some more coffee as the Georgia landscape gave way with no discernible change to the South Carolina landscape. I checked my arteries. Blood still seemed to be getting through, so I had another sausage biscuit.
I was experiencing a little of the separateness I always felt when I was away from Susan. It wasn't unreality exactly, it was more a sense that there was a large empty space around me. Even now, sitting in a squad car, maybe eighteen inches from another guy, there was a sense of crystalline isolation. It was not loneliness, nor did the feeling make me unhappy. It was simply a feeling different from any other, a feeling available only when I was away from Susan. I was alone.
'What do you know about the Clive family?' I said.
'Somebody been shooting their horses,' Becker said.
'Besides that,' I said. 'Any of them had any problems with the law?'
'Clives are the most important family in the whole Columbia County,' Becker said. 'They don't have trouble with the law.'
'Have they come to the attention of the law?' I said.
We were driving along a two-lane highway now. There were fields with farm equipment standing idle, and occasionally a Safeway market or a Burger King. Traffic was light. Becker kept his eyes on the road.
'You got a reason for asking?' he said.
'I'm practicing to be a detective,' I said. 'Plus the family seems to be full of people who would get in trouble.'
' 'Cept for Penny.'
'Except for her,' I said.
'Old man's calmed down some, since Dolly came aboard.'
'But before that?'
'Well. For a while he was married to the girls' mother. Don't remember her name right this minute. But she was a hippie.'
'Lot of hippies around thirty years ago,' I said.
'Yep, and that's when they got married. But times changed and she didn't. 'Bout ten years ago she ran off with a guy played in a rock band.'
'So Penny would have been about fifteen.'
'Yep. The other girls were a little older.'
'They're two years apart,' I said. 'So they'd have been seventeen and nineteen.'
'See that,' Becker said. 'You been detecting more than you pretend.'
'I'm a modest guy,' I said. 'How was the divorce?'
'Don't know nothing about the divorce.'
