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could see himself lying beside a road someplace, as motionless as a drunk,
only not drunk. Dead. He wondered if Sam ever felt that presentiment of doom,
if Sam ever felt that his time was running out. Danny never asked him; talking
about fear was an unwritten taboo with cops. Don't say it out loud and it
won't happen.
If either of them was living on borrowed time, it would have to be Sam. Sam
was forty-eight, a veteran of two departments and twenty-seven years, survivor
of two marriages, and with such a thirst for alcohol that his liver should
have turned to stone years ago. Booze had gotten him booted off the Seattle
Police Department, out of the homicide unit. Sam had made it on the street, on
the bikes, and into the rarefied air of homicide. Danny wondered how it must
be for him to be back in uniform now in a county car.
But that was something else they never talked about.
He studied Sam as he bent over the report, one hand splayed on the desk, his
long, skinny legs dangling next to
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the spittoon that had been there for forty years. Clinton looked as if he'd
been born and raised in Natchitat County. His tooled boots were beat up but
polished, just like every other deputy's were. His skin was as tanned and
crisscrossed with frown and smile lines as any apple grower's. Danny couldn't
picture him in the suit, white shirt, and striped tie he must have worn when
he was a Seattle dick.
He stretched and said softly to Sam, "How's your balls? Maybe you better get
home and pack them in ice."
Sam stood up painfully and grinned, showing the gap between his front teeth.
"They're better than yours on a good day, Junior."
Fletcher looked up from the dispatch desk and laughed. "He's right, Clinton.
You better get on back to your trailer and ice 'em down. At your age, anything
that will make them keep, you better give it a shot."
"There's some things that go on forever, gentlemen," Sam said. "I may just
drop in on Mary Jean on the way home, Fletch, and show her what a real stud
can doùsince you're stuck here playing radio."
Fletcher laughed.
"Mary Jean's working tonight, old buddy. You'll have to go over to the
maternity ward and see if she can slip out to the broom closet with you, but
don't hold your breath. I just talked to her and they're catching babies over
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there as fast as the mamas can squeeze them out."
"Full moon," Sam nodded. "You can count on it. I'll nail her next week."
"It won't be hard to catch her," Fletcher grinned. "That little woman is
putting on weight. I think she weighs more than I do."
Mary Jean Sayers outweighed Fletch easily by eighty pounds, but Danny and Sam
tactfully avoided agreeing with the little radio operator. Sam, in fact,
envied Fletch, dreading the thought of returning to his own mobile home empty
of any living thing except his old tomcat.
Sam didn't want to leave the sheriffs office; it was more home to him than
anyplace else, just as all the department offices over the years had been. He
belonged here, bull-
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shitting with Fletch and Danny and the deputies who wandered in and out. He
liked the smell of the place: cigar smoke, dusty files, leather, gun oil, and
drifts of aroma from the jail kitchen beyond the steel mesh doors behind the
waiting room. Working graveyard, he could make the work time stretch, usually
delay until the sun began to creep up on the other side of the hills before
he'd finished his paper work.
Everybody else had someplace to go after shift, and someone to go to. Sam had
run through everyone he'd ever had waiting for him, and he tried not to think
about the women who had finally had enough of him. Enough of him, and liquor,
and too much overtime, too many night call-outs, and his stumblings from grace
with other women.
When Sam left home at twenty to join the navy, he encountered a seemingly
endless supply of girls and more-than-girls who responded both to his open
acceptance of them and his profound sexual force. Somehow, he could not keep
them or they could not keep him. But until he was forty, until Nina, he had
emerged unscathed beyond a fleeting depression. After Nina, he still liked
women but doubted that any singular love might be his again. And he blamed
only himself. Even sitting here in the office, nursing his bruises, he felt no
animosity toward the Indian woman who'd landed the blow. She'd been hysterical
over a real or imagined rejection by the runty cowboy at the bar. She hadn't
wanted to go to jail, but he couldn't blame her for that. He'd been in a lot
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