bench outside the office when I returned. We watched as lights went off and stores got locked up and cars pulled out toward home. Except for the diner now, everything was deserted. Framed in its front windows, anonymous heads bent over burgers, steak platters, pie and coffee.
'But damn, that felt good. Can't tell you how I miss it, Turner.'
'Saving lives?'
Mind caught in memories, he was quiet a moment.
'Not really. It's more about knowing exactly what to do-the branching decisions you make, the way each decision, each change, calls up a sequence of actions-and doing it almost without conscious thought. Not much in the world that compares.'
Doc would have gone on, possibly for hours, but it was right about then that Jed Baxter pulled up in his Camry. I met him at the street.
'Back so soon? And please tell me that the passenger in your backseat is merely sleeping.'
'Damnedest thing,' Baxter said. 'Got a late start, so I figure what the hell, I'll grab lunch before heading out. And I stop at this mom-and-pop-looking place-out there right before you hit the highway?'
'Ko-Z Inn.'
'Right. Nasty food.'
'But filling.'
'Ought to be their motto… So, after five or six coffees at the cafe and half an hour on the road, naturally I gotta pee, so I pull over. Do my thing, and when I look up, this guy's come out of the trees and is climbing in my car. Time I get there, he's got his head down under the dash poking around at wires.' Baxter opened the back door. 'Figured I'd bring him to you.'
'Kind of a going-away present.'
'For the one that's staying, right. Hope he's okay. Had to thump the sucker twice to put him down.'
'Cuffs, huh?' Plastic, but police issue.
'Always carry some with me. Hey, you never know.'
'That right arm's not looking too good.'
'What can I say? Man didn't care to be cuffed. Laying there on the ground with his lights out, but he's still fighting at me.'
'And you had to thump him again.'
'Maybe. A little. You want the sonofabitch or not?'
Baxter and I hauled him in and laid him on the bunk in one of the cells. Doc sauntered in complaining that this didn't look to be much of a challenge, checked reflexes and pupils and the like, and said that in his hardly- ever-humble opinion the man was fit to be jailed.
Which left a couple of things hanging.
First off, since we had a prisoner, someone was going to have to hold down the fort tonight, which probably meant me.
Then there was the fact that this guy matched the description I'd got from Burl: medium height but looking taller because of being so thin, maybe 150, and what there was, muscle; hair light brown, long on the sides and back, not much left on top; blue-green Hawaiian shirt, heavy oxfords, khaki slacks.
So in all likelihood I had one of Milly's kidnappers (if that's what they were) and a killer (assuming that he shot his partner), all dressed up nice with his lights out, back in my cell. An enforcer of some kind? Runner? Or just hired help? I couldn't help but think how it turned out the last time something like this came along. I'd walked into the office to find June and Don on the floor unconscious, our prisoner gone. The fallout from that had rung in the air for some time, leaving behind a number of bodies, Val's included.
I called Don Lee to tell him what was going on, and that I'd take the night watch if he'd come in first thing in the morning. I sat there all night in the dead quiet drinking pot after pot of coffee, staring at the black window, and thinking about prison, how it was never quiet, how, surrounded by hundreds of others, you were as alone as it was possible to be.
But before that, I said good-bye again to Jed Baxter and rejoined Doc Oldham on the bench outside. The diner was closing for the night, Jay and Margie and Cook (the only name he'd admit to) making their final runs to the trash barrels in back. Pale rainbows shelled the few lights along the street, cyclones of flying insects pouring inexhaustibly into them.
'Sit here some days,' Doc said, 'and I half expect tumbleweed to come rolling down that street. Audie Murphy to ride in on his goddamn white horse. You know who Audie Murphy was?'
I did. Some of the first movies I remember seeing. Audie Murphy mugging and mumbling, Sergeant York doing turkey calls. All those grand films about war from a much younger, far more innocent nation, innocent not in the sense of guiltlessness but in that of immaturity, of callowness.
'We want so badly to believe things are simple, Turner. That good and evil are in constant battle and by Tuesday of next week one or the other will win. You've said the same yourself.'
'Many times.'
'And still-' He laughed, and had to catch his breath. 'And still we are not exempt.'
'No.'
We sat there quietly, beset by mosquitoes and the occasional errant moth. Cook emerged from the alley with his bicycle, mounted it, and rode off into darkness. Jay's truck pulled out and turned in the other direction. Once-bright red and yellow flames on the bicycle were mostly shadow. The truck's patches and layers of paint resembled, more than anything, fish scales; some were thick as artichoke leaves.
After a time, Doc said, 'You haven't told anyone, have you, Turner?'
'No.'
'Maybe you should.'
I was silent. Who would I tell? And why?
'Yeah,' Doc said, 'you're right. It's none of their damned business.'
Two months back, on the routine physical he'd been hounding me about for ages, Doc found something he didn't like. Probably nothing to it, he said, just those damn fool kids up at the lab with their e-pods. But we'd best repeat it. Then he showed up at the cabin late one night with a bottle of single malt. As usual, I'd heard his banger coming three miles down the road.
'Greeks bearing gifts-' I began.
'Are as nothing compared to an old man with a bottle of old whiskey. The old man is tired. The whiskey isn't. So we'll put it to work.'
We didn't talk much more for a while after that. Then, along about the third pour, Doc told me, just flat out and plain, like he'd mention the weather or a dog he used to have. We drank some more, and as he was leaving he started to say something, then just looked into my eyes and shook his head.
I remember how warm and quiet it was that night, and how bright the stars.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Some years back I attended a wedding, one of the guys I was in the service with, and the last contact I had, I think, with any of them. We'd been through a lot together, and his take on it was close to my own: getting through meant we were now somewhere else. But his wife-to-be insisted that he have one of his 'army buddies' there, so I became token grunt.
And it wasn't bad. He was marrying up, with a high-pay job awaiting him at the family firm. Even the house they'd be living in had been prepaid, so clean and white it looked as though it had been dipped in Clorox. The food was good and ample, the champagne excellent, the people, especially the women, attractive.
Barely into the ceremony, the preacher took a detour, leaving behind such commonalities as marriage vows and the couple standing there at the altar patiently waiting, to head off, instead, in praise of 'the most important union of their lives,' i.e., when they accepted Jesus Christ-a commercial announcement that went on for some time. But wind had been rising steadily, and as the preacher continued in his diversion, a powerful gust came up. It snapped the tableclothes, blew leaves sideways on the trees, and raised a twenty-foot dust devil into the air
