Chapter 3

The swiftly moving Arctic front hit Meriwether in midafternoon with thundering gusts of wind that swept the street clean of all those people still dressed in light clothes who believed in Indian Summers that lasted forever. Then a stiff, cold rain began to fall, sliding down the wind. By the time I headed across town to pick up a car at the Haliburton offices, the temperature had dropped into the thirties and the raindrops hit my windshield in slushy pellets.

As I swung left off Railroad onto Dottle, I noticed one of Haliburton’s armored trucks parked at an odd angle in the lot in front of Hamburger Heaven. The driver, leaning out his door, his revolver dangling from his hand, shouted at the passing traffic, occasionally lifting the pistol and aiming it at the cars. During the few moments it took me to drive down the short block of Dottle, I saw four cars and a beer truck bolt like frightened cattle right through the red light.

The driver’s eyes glowed in the ashen light, drunk or drugged or simply crazed. The man, whose name I couldn’t remember, was one of Colonel Haliburton’s basket cases, a Vietnam vet with a good war record and a terrible employment history. The colonel was a born do-gooder, one of those unusual career military men who also think of themselves as soldiers in God’s compassionate army. He had given this guy a chance at a steady job, but things didn’t seem to be working out too well.

After I parked my pickup on the other side of the armored truck, I tore my uniform coat open, loosened my collar and tie and mussed my hair, thinking that if I looked as disheveled as the driver did, he might not waste me out of hand. I had never been a master of disguise, though, and when I stepped around the back of the truck and said hello, the driver dropped out of the door into a combat stance and laid a bead right on the old trembling thorax area.

“What the fuck are you doing here, man?” he asked, his voice shaking and his knuckles white on the butt of the .38.

“Oh, shit,” I said, “I don’t exactly know.” And I meant it.

“Just like over there, right, dad? Nobody fucking knew.” I didn’t have to ask where there might be. “Nobody knew, and you don’t know shit from wild honey about it, dad, what it was like.”

“I spent time on the line in Korea,” I offered lamely.

“Korea?” he sneered. “The line? Well, kiss my rosy red ass.” Then he lifted the revolver straight up into the gray, windy rain, pulled the trigger six times, six flat ugly splats as the hammer fell on empty chambers. He laughed wildly as he tossed his piece onto the front seat of the armored truck. “Tell the colonel to stuff his charity, right, and his goddamned empty guns. I ain’t much into limited warfare, man. If I’d gone to Canada, dad, I’d have both my kidneys and all my marbles, right? Ain’t it the shits.” He sighed, shook his head, then stumbled off toward the nearest bar, the Deuce down on Railroad, his lank hair poking wetly from under his uniform cap.

I stood there a long time, it seemed, the cold rain seeping down my collar, then decided I wasn’t going to wet my pants or collapse into a frightened puddle, so I locked up the truck, took the keys and the empty .38, then drove very carefully across town, trying not to look at the bars. Some security outfits, I had read, equipped their rent-a-cops with rubber guns for their own safety. Symbolic fire power, I thought, an idea whose time has come. The .38 that I carried at work, wrapped in its holster belt on the front seat of the pickup, was, like the driver’s, empty. By choice. A few years back, when I still worked for myself, I had killed two men at close range, and although I couldn’t bear to throw away all that lovely, lethal machinery I had collected over the years, I did throw all my live rounds into the Meriwether River.

—

Haliburton’s had me working relief that shift, filling in for piss-calls and dinner breaks for the first four hours, easing around the now freezing streets in my yellow Pinto with the little blue light on the roof—barbecue pits on the hoof, we called them—my door unlocked and my seat belt off. As happened every winter, most of the drivers in Meriwether seemed to have forgotten all about ice during the summer months and they drove as if the streets were bare and dry, which made my job more dangerous than philosophical discussions about war as an arm of diplomacy with armed crazy people. Dangerous, but so goddamn boring. And I felt like a clown dressed in my brown-on-brown uniform with its old-fashioned Sam Browne belt like a mule’s harness across my chest.

At least the last four hours of my shift would be warm and safe, off the streets, sitting behind a sheet of one-way mirrored glass in the back room of an EZ-IN/EZ-OUT twenty-four-hour convenience market and filling station out on South Dawson. Warm because I had a small electric heater for my feet, and safe because we had video tapes of the guy we were trying to catch who had been knocking over convenience markets all over town, a tall, skinny kid in a ski mask who we knew owned a police-band radio because he only hit stores when the police were busy with fires or drunken wrecks out on the interstate, and who held the clerks at bay with what looked like a starter’s pistol. In Montana, where we have more guns than people and cattle, maybe even trees, this dude had been knocking them down with a goddamn blank pistol.

After I checked in with the Haliburton dispatcher on the company band, I settled into the little room, turned on the police scanner and the CB radio, checked the television cameras and the tape monitor, then made a fresh pot of coffee. Sipping that first good cup out of the pot, I thought about Sarah, the way she savored the smell, enjoyed her tiny sip. Most of the time, instead of considering old age and preparing myself for some wise gentle assault on those last years, I thought about fifty-two and my father’s money. My final days might not take too long when they came around, but I intended to enjoy them.

The CB crackled in the background. Out on the interstate where it sliced through the northern edge of the city limits, long-haul truckers were complaining about the slick roads, their piles, and Smokey the Bear. On the police scanner, all the units were too busy with a rash of fender benders and resultant fistfights to complain. Ah, winter wonderland, I thought as I leaned back in the swivel chair and stared through the one-way glass, down the aisle, and out the glass front of the store. Across the street, the blue blinking light of the Doghouse Lounge made it look like a more romantic and mysterious place than it really was. It was a workingman’s place, and the parking lot was full of pickups with rifles racked in the rear windows. At least they served whiskey there, and I could think about a drink as I watched the customers string through the store, grumbling not a bit about the thirty percent extra they paid for convenience.

Two teen-aged girls on their way to the movie down the street used the mirror side of the glass to make certain that their eyelashes were as thick and furry as tarantula legs, giggling about some poor unsuspecting lad named Shawn they planned to surprise at the theater, then they gaggled away in a cloud of youthful laughter. A bit later a lanky kid came in, swiped a can of Coke and a package of red licorice rope, stuffing them into the game pocket of his 60/40 parka, then spent a few minutes working on his zits in the mirror before he left, paying for a package of gum. I started to hit the shoplifter switch, but the clerk behind the counter had his nose in a motorcycle magazine, and I decided this shoplifter was Shawn of the giggles and already in more trouble than he could handle, so I let him walk. In the days before juveniles had legal rights, a shoplifting bust could be worked out between the parents and the store manager. But legal rights meant paperwork, which in turn meant records, and no governmental body of any size, shape, or function had ever found a way to dispose of records. After the kid had gone, I went out front, paid for the candy and Coke, and made sure that the clerk rang up the sale instead of skimming it.

About nine-thirty, with an hour left on my shift, a seven-car pile-up blocked the Dawson Street bridge, and an “every available unit” call went out on the police band. Fifteen minutes later out on the Interstate, a semi load of frozen turkeys locked its trailer brakes, skidded on the iced pavement, and jackknifed into the median, spreading toms and hens like small boulders all over the landscape.

Meriwether lived off lumber, and with interest rates up and housing starts down, two mills had closed their saws forever the previous summer, and the pulp mill had been on half shifts for three months. So Meriwether was chock-full of surly unemployed folks facing a Thanksgiving with little to be thankful for and a Christmas even more grim. When news of the turkey wreck swept through town by CB radio and telephone, a lot of unhappy people piled into their four-wheel-drive rigs and headed for the highway, muttering “Thanksgiving” under their collective breaths, “Christmas.” I cheered them on. They might as well have the turkeys because the USDA would show up the next day, condemn the meat, and consign it to the dump.

As riots go, it didn’t sound like a big one, but large enough to involve three sheriff’s deputies and two highway patrolmen. No fatalities, either, just two broken legs when a drunk on a snowmobile ran down a housewife in the median, and a minor concussion when her husband knocked the drunk off the snowmobile with a well-aimed twelve-pound hen.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention to business. When I stopped laughing long enough to glance up, a tall skinny kid in a ski mask held a small pistol behind a loaf of white bread while the frightened clerk shoveled bills and change into a paper bag between frightened looks cast my way. I wasn’t ready; the rusty snap on my holster took forever to open and I couldn’t have loaded my piece if I had wanted to. I hit the silent alarm, even though the police units were all busy, slipped out the door, hid behind the upright Coke cooler. When the bandit turned away from the cashier, I leapt out into the aisle to do my bit for law and order and the American way of life.

“Police!” I shouted. “Freeze!”

Well, it works on television. But this guy jumped three feet in the air and got off two rounds at me before his bandit shoes hit the tile floor. Starter’s pistol, my ass; the video tapes had lied. I dove back behind the cooler, then bellied over to peek under the potato-chip rack just as the kid hit the front door. He didn’t make it out, though. Two fiery muzzle flashes flamed out of the Doghouse parking lot, followed by the roar of high-velocity hunting rifles. The kid spun wildly, scattering folding money and change as he fell into a rack of motor oil and antifreeze beside the door. A whole shelf of onion-and-sour-cream-flavored potato chips exploded over my head, and a rack of Coke cans crashed through the glass doors and fell on my back, hissing like angry snakes.

Two more muzzle flashes came out of the parking lot. The rounds popped through the plate glass, spraying fragments like grenade shrapnel, ripped out whole shelves of dry and canned goods, snipped through the glass doors of the beer cooler behind me, releasing a sea of foam.

“Had enough in there?” somebody shouted from across the street.

I, for one, certainly had, but I was curled too tightly into a damp ball to answer. The bandit, though, grunted “Fuck you, white-eyes,” then let off a useless round into the ceiling. The rifles answered with a four-round volley, and the whole interior of the store seemed to explode. Even a row of fluorescent lights on the twelve-foot ceiling disintegrated, the shards of tubes drifting like snow through the dust.

“Enough now?” the voice shouted again, laughing.

“Enough!” I screamed, then started to throw my piece out into the aisle until I remembered I was supposed to be one of the good guys. I stood up, praying the bastards could see my uniform under the soggy coat of chips. Behind me I could hear rivers of cold beer rushing and a punctured aerosol can wheezing in a slow circle. Out front, two men darted across the street like some dream of combat infantrymen under attack. When they didn’t shoot, I stuffed my empty revolver back into the wet holster, then went up front to separate the dead from the dying.

Somehow the clerk hadn’t been hit. When he saw me, he leapt from his hiding place beneath the counter, vaulted over it, and ran out the door into the freezing rain without a jacket. I knew the kid in the ski mask had been hit, knew it was going to be bad, with the way hunting rounds mushroomed and fragmented on impact and killed with hydrostatic shock. He looked dead, too, where he lay in a pool of antifreeze, oil, and blood. But when I tried to pry the cheap .22 revolver out of his hand, he had live resistance in his fingers.

Two guys wearing down vests over flannel shirts, their scoped elk rifles at port arms, charged through the front door. I asked for their help as I tried to ease the kid out of the muck, but they were too busy admiring their handiwork. When I asked a second time, louder, the nearest one said “Fuck him” and nudged the bandit’s arm with a heavy hunting boot.

“Hey, that’s right,” I said, standing up, “we’re the good guys and we don’t have to mess with shit like this.” When I tried for a good-old-boy grin, it felt as if my face cracked. “Damn good shooting,” I said. “What the hell you guys using?” I reached for the nearest one’s rifle. He let me have it rather absent-mindedly as he stared wide-eyed around the ruined store. When I hit his buddy in the forehead with the rifle butt, he still didn’t seem too concerned. He had enough sense left to shake his head at me once, but maybe he didn’t shake it hard enough. I took him out, too, then dragged them outside and cuffed one’s wrist to the other’s through the front-door handle. Up close, there seemed to be some family resemblance between them, except that one’s forehead hung over his eyes and the other’s nose was three inches wide and flapjack-thick. Then I quickly unloaded their rifles and made junk out of them against the curb.

When I got the bandit out of the slippery mess to a fairly clean part of the floor, I slid off the ski mask, and a long string of bubbly froth looped out of his mouth. He was just a kid, maybe twenty, with the dark coppery skin and flat round face of a Benniwah. When I cut off his shirt and jacket, I saw that he had the small delicate chest of a malnourished child. The round had taken him just below the right collarbone. Because the bullet must have been wobbling after passing through the plate glass, it caused an unusually large entrance wound, and the exit wound through his shoulder blade was as large as the bottom of a beer can. The round must have clipped the top of his lung, too, because both wounds were sucking air. Finally I found enough gauze pads on the shelf to pack them, and I bound them tightly with tape.

By then the inevitable crowd had begun to gather from the bar and the theater and the vehicles parked along the street to see the real blood, the real dying. While I was working on the kid they had stayed back, staring through the ruined windows, and they shied from my glances as if they had seen a caged animal they were afraid to recognize. As usually happens, too, some had come to help. One man held the crowd at bay, another took a flashlight and waved passing cars past the store, and a stout young woman wearing glasses and a full-length leather coat pushed through the crowd. She slipped out of her coat, under which she wore a long pink wool dress. “I’m a nurse,” she said calmly as she came through the door and draped her coat over the kid. “Are you okay?” she asked as she patted my cheek.

“A little shaky,” I said, “but the kid’s hurt bad.”

We knelt beside him and noticed that his breath turned sour and shallow, rattling, bloody spittle snaking out of his mouth. She took his pulse, and it seemed I could feel his blood flow dwindle to a thread under her fingers.

“We’re losing him,” she said quietly, staring at me over the narrow, bottomless gulf.

She got on his chest, and I propped his chin back, checked to see if he had swallowed his tongue, then pinched his pug nose and started the mouth-to-mouth. Sometimes we can breathe for each other, muscle the heart. Somehow we kept him going ten, maybe fifteen minutes until the EMS technicians arrived with the ambulance. He seemed to be breathing on his own when they strapped him onto the stretcher. The nurse tossed her coat to a man she seemed to know—a husband or a date—and the two of us leaned against the counter breathing hard for ourselves, then we fell into each other’s arms so hard that it knocked off her glasses, held each other like old lovers. Over her shoulder I could see her date or husband or whatever holding her bloody coat as if it were something he had found in the street.

—

After most of the police had come and gone, after I had stood ankle-deep in the back cooler for half an hour, breaking my schnapps vow and drinking beer after beer, then promptly throwing them up, I went out front to stand in the freezing rain with Colonel Haliburton and the chief of police, Jamison, my old buddy, asshole buddy from childhood, Korea, adopted father of my son. The three of us stood outside, even beyond the roof overhang, as if somebody had died inside the store, and watched three Haliburton uniformed guards set up sawhorse and rope barricades around the lot. The young couple who managed the store, dressed in matching maroon bathrobes and white flannel pajamas covered with tiny red and green reindeer, huddled in the dim, smoky light just inside the front door. Occasionally one or the other would break into a tiptoe trot through the mess to pick up a can of dog food or a box of breakfast cereal off the floor, place it carefully on the shelf, then gently straighten the row.

“They might as well have used hand grenades,” the colonel said softly, shaking his head.

“Fucking assholes,” I muttered.

The colonel lifted his flat cap off his balding head and frowned into the darkness, away from me. In spite of all his years in the Army, profanity still embarrassed him as much as it must have when he was a good little Lutheran farm boy growing up outside Grand Forks, North Dakota. He cleared his throat in disapproval, then stared even harder into the distance, as if he were watching the fresh snow on the Hardrocks. “I don’t know how you do it, Milo,” Jamison said sadly. “I don’t know how you get into so much trouble.”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

He looked at me hard and for a long, silent time. We hadn’t been friends since I was bounced off the sheriff’s department for looking the other way from some illegal punchboards. Then he married my first ex-wife and adopted my son, which hadn’t improved our affairs.

“I would like to see you in my office tomorrow morning,” Jamison said bluntly, “eight A.M. sharp, Milo, not one minute later.” He paused and ran his hand through his rain-wet hair. “Why did you have to break up their rifles?” he added. “Why?”

“The heat of passion,” I said.

“Just be there,” he said, “because I think you’ve bought the farm this time.” Since Evelyn—my ex-wife, his wife—had recently left him to take up residence with a twenty-eight-year-old vegetarian French professor at Reed College in Portland, Jamison had trouble focusing his anger on me. “Just be there,” he repeated.

“Ah-hem,” the colonel said, “my lawyer will be there also.” Then he walked over to comfort the young couple. I started to follow him.

“Just a minute, Milo,” Jamison said. “I’ve been meaning to call you. Evelyn has this idea that we have to be civilized about all this shit.”

“Civilized,” I said. “What shit?”

“You and me and her and the boy,” he sighed, “and whatever it is she lives with. She says we should all be adults about this, and she’s got tickets to the Washington State-Stanford game, and she wants all to gather on neutral ground to watch the boy play.”

“How’s he doing?” I asked. Eric played defensive end for the WSU Cougars.

“Great,” Jamison said, nearly smiling. “He’s started the last three games. Kicking ass. Or so I read in the papers. I haven’t been able to get away for a game this year.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, “even though I don’t want to.”

“Call me,” he said, “and I’ll see you in the morning.” Then he stalked away in the rain, some of which had turned to sleet. The tiny white pellets gathered on the stooped shoulders of his tweed overcoat.

When I turned around, the colonel had his hands on the younger couple’s arms, reassuring them all over again that his men would hang plywood sheets over the broken windows and would watch the store for the rest of the night. Then he gave them a gentle shove toward their Toyota pickup. The wife burst into tears and her husband looked as if he wanted to do the same, but he just clutched a milk carton to his chest so tightly that it leaked down the front of his robe as they walked away.

The colonel strode over to me, saying, “I want you to know that the entire legal resources of the corporation are at your disposal, Milo.”

“Even if I quit?” I said.

“Even if you quit,” he said, “but don’t quit.” The colonel had some romantic notion that because I had once worked a one-man office he had to keep me employed just in case he ever needed my old-fashioned, peculiar talents. “Don’t quit.”

“Sir, I can’t stand any more of this monkey-suit business.”

“Boredom and the bottle,” the colonel said, looking at his ox-blood cordovans. His wife, it was rumored, drank. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered, “there’s just no call these days…but I did get a query from an outfit on the Coast today. They needed someone to tail a woman for a couple of days until they can get their own security people on it. I don’t know the outfit, but I’ll accept the job, and you can do it, then take a week or so off, with pay of course, to think about it.”

“Jesus,” I said, suddenly so tired that my head seemed to spin. “Sir, I just don’t know—”

“Two weeks,” he said, “as a favor to me.”

“Only because you ask.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I want you to know that you handled that incident with Simmons this afternoon perfectly. I do appreciate that, Milo.”

“Simmons?”

“The driver of the armored truck.”

“Never can remember that kid’s name,” I admitted. “I just happened to be passing by, sir, and I really didn’t do anything.”

“Which was perfect,” he said, then added to nobody in particular, “I’ve got to get that boy some help, somehow.” Then he turned back to me, extended a hand. “I do thank you, though.”

“Anytime,” I said, shook his hand, then loaned him my handkerchief so he could wipe the sticky Coke slime off his hand.

“I’ll leave the woman’s name and address with the dispatcher,” he said, “and you can pick it up after your, ah, chat with Jamison…You don’t mind if I ask about the trouble between the two of you?”

“A long story,” I said. “History.”

“I see,” he said, then waved aimlessly as he marched off toward his gray Mercedes, a staunch, stocky, erect figure of a man, a good soldier to the end. The colonel had retired to Meriwether and started a small security service so he could afford his fishing trips, but he was too good at the business. It kept expanding. First into alarm systems, then into armored transport, then into branch offices all over the Mountain West. I knew for a fact that he hadn’t wet a fishing line in over two years.

When he started the engine of his Mercedes, the diesel clattered loudly. I wondered what sort of man tried to keep aging detectives out of the bars, to provide jobs for half-crazed Vietnam vets, and drove a thirty-five-thousand-dollar automobile that sounded like a truck, wondered, as always, what to think about the colonel. Usually, professional military men and successful businessmen gave me a pain in the ass, but I liked the colonel. I didn’t even mind that he had stolen my handkerchief.

When I walked around to the rear of the store to pick up the Pinto, the cold beer in my shoes felt like frozen slush, and most of the glass had been blown out of the little tin car by errant rounds. Only a railroad embankment behind the store had saved the two vigilantes from spreading misery and mayhem throughout the neighborhood. I wiped the shards of safety glass off the front seat, as best I could in the darkness, then drove across town to pick up my truck, the sleet funneling into my face through the broken windshield.

—

By the time I had showered the soda syrup and chips out of my hair and off my back, changed clothes, and indulged myself in a short toot, I felt as old as I was ever going to get. Even though I was already an hour late for my meeting with Gail, I heaved myself off my couch, eased the pickup over the icy streets down to the Deuce, where a bluegrass band fretted through its last set. She was nowhere to be found in the crowded bar or among the dancers stomping on the floor. Even Raoul, my dealer, had gone home. I saw a biker gang I knew, but we didn’t exchange greetings, and the armored-truck driver, whose name I had forgotten again, still in his Haliburton uniform, sleeping at a table in the shadows beside the back door. I gave up and walked across the street to Arnie’s, a bar for serious drinkers, where nobody either cared or noticed if your hands trembled so badly that it took both of them to get a shot of schnapps to your mouth.

I saw my postman there, though, also still in the baggy sack of his borrowed uniform, but he had a fat lip I hadn’t given him, so I had one shot, then went home to my little log house in the canyon.

—

Since the colonel’s lawyer—a sharp young dude dressed in Western clothes and wearing, fastened to his string tie, what looked to be the piece of turquoise the size of an elk turd that I hadn’t bought—and I were both on time the next morning, the police took my statement politely and with a minimum amount of fuss and bother. Jamison didn’t even show up.

When I got out to the Haliburton offices, the colonel hadn’t come in either, so I picked up the name and address from the dispatcher. A wildly impressive name, Cassandra Bogardus, but a rather shabby address over on the north side beyond the tracks, 1414 Gold. None of the women I knew on the north side could afford the sort of trouble that called for a two-hundred-a-day tail. I didn’t really care, though, because I was so glad to be out of uniform. Two days of this, I thought, then I can do Sarah Weddington’s crazy number and head south.

I signed for a white Chevy van without checking the fake magnetic signs on the doors, transferred my surveillance gear to the van from my pickup, and headed for the north side of town. By ten o’clock that morning I was on station half a block down Gold from the Bogardus house.

The freezing rain and sleet had, as the weatherman had predicted, changed to snow, and the temperature had stabilized in the low twenties. Weather, as Gail had said. But it didn’t bother me; I had all the comforts of home. A snowmobile suit and down booties kept me snug and warm as I lounged in the plastic web of a lawn chair in the back of the van. If I leaned forward a bit, my eye nestled easily against the 25X spotting scope that hid behind the smoked glass of the rear window. On my right I had a huge thermos of coffee, on my left lunch—a bag full of homemade sandwiches, egg salad on light rye with a slice of Walla Walla white onion as thick as my finger—and if nature called, I was ready. In the corner of the van sat a Port-a-Potty like a faithful robot companion prepared for duty. I might not know why I was doing what I was doing, but I had done it enough in the old days to know how to do it in comfort.

The Bogardus house sat on a large corner lot. An untrimmed hedge and clumps of shrubbery drooped under the load of heavy wet snow. Two vehicles were parked in the driveway—a beautifully restored 1964 Mustang convertible with New Hampshire plates, and a brand-new three-quarter-ton 4×4 GMC pickup with a load of firewood in the bed and Maryland plates. Firewood, neatly split and stacked, also covered most of the side porch. In the backyard, a huge compost pile stood next to a large garden already winter-bedded and covered with straw. The small window in the front door showed no light in the gray, snowy day, and the other windows were dark behind half shutters and tie-dyed drapes. A wisp of woodsmoke trickled out of the chimney, though, curling among the large drifting flakes.

I settled in for the waiting, oddly excited to be working again. During the next two hours, while nothing happened, I decided that Sarah’s job might be fun—picking up two unknown people, filling in their history, finding out what sordid little secrets drew them to their weekly rendezvous. An old Chicago cop had taught me how to tail by choosing a perfect stranger off the street and making me dog the man or woman for days on end, put them to bed at night, wake them up in the morning. I was surprised to find out how few strangers, when I watched their lives for a few days, turned out to be perfectly boring. Almost everybody, it seemed, led at least one secret life. Except me. I was the watcher, the uninvolved observer. Sometimes a boring job, but usually safe.

Or so I thought until I was halfway into my first sandwich and somebody started pounding on the side of the van. With the blackout curtain hanging behind the front seats and the smoked glass in the rear windows, I knew nobody could see inside, so I sat very still until a face peered blindly through one of the back windows. I peeked out from the other one. It was a wiry old man in house slippers, shiny black slacks, and an old-fashioned undershirt. He wore a huge mustache, yellowed with age but neatly trimmed and combed, long enough to nearly reach his defiant little chin. The hands of a much larger man dangled off his corded arms. He raised one of them and slapped the smoked glass hard enough to shake the van.

“I know you’re in there, you lazy son of a bitch!” he shouted, then slapped the glass again while I ducked away.

When he grabbed the rear bumper and began rocking the van, I gave up. “I’m coming,” I shouted, “I’m coming.” Then, swaddled in the snowmobile suit and as clumsy as a drunken bear, I wrestled through the blackout curtain and out the passenger door.

“I called you sons a bitches yesterday afternoon,” the old man said when he saw me, “yesterday goddamned afternoon. And you promised you’d be here before noon. So what the hell do you do? Show up and take a snooze right in my front yard.” Then he shook a fist the size of a steer’s kneebone under my nose, and tiny drifts of snow fell off his bare shoulders. As he looked at me, his eyes didn’t seem to focus correctly, and I saw the pinched creases on the bridge of his nose where his glasses usually rested.

“Why me?” I muttered as I stepped backward to see what sort of sign hung on the van’s door. Not Floral Delivery or Washing Machine Repair, not Knife Sharpening or Housecleaning Services—nothing safe for me—but TV REPAIR in large black letters.

“Well?” the old man said, raising his fist again.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You must have talked to the girl in the office.”

“Didn’t talk to no girl,” he growled, “talked directly to you.” Snowflakes gathered in his eyebrows and on his thin hair began to melt, but the old man ignored the icy water trickling down his wrinkled face.

“Not to me,” I said, “you didn’t talk to me.” Then I chanced a glance at the sign. “Not to me—Clyde ‘Shorty’ Griffith,” I read.

The old man looked at me as if I was crazy. He raised one woolly eyebrow as if to say, “What sort of damn fool has to read his name off a sign to remember it?” Then he squinted at the sign again, shifted his shoulders, and grumbled. I thought I had him until he said, “Did so.” Even caught in confusion and blindness, the old man wasn’t about to retreat. “Damn sure did.”

“Couldn’t have,” I said, retreating myself. “I…ah, I was out with the flu.” Then added with a whine, “And I wasn’t taking a nap, I was having lunch.”

“Whiskey flu,” he said, “and a two goddamned hour whiskey lunch.”

“No way,” I said, but the old man had me backing up so fast that I didn’t even believe myself anymore. “Not true.”

“Well,” he said, licking the snow water off his mustache, “you damn sure promised, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, to have my TV fixed before one o’clock”—he tugged a large Hamilton railroad watch out of his pants, consulted it about six inches from his face—“and I’ve got a lady friend coming over in forty-seven minutes to watch General Hospital, and if my set ain’t fixed by then, I’m gonna call the Better Business Bureau, maybe even the county attorney…you people think you can treat old folks like shit…well, I’m here to tell you that don’t go with Abner Haynes—”

“Okay,” I said, thinking I had run into enough crazy people in the past two days to last me a lifetime. If my cover hadn’t already been blown, it certainly would be if I spent any more time in the street debating the issue with the old man. I needed to move the van now, anyway, so maybe if I took a few moments to run his set downtown to a repair shop, leave it, and rent a loaner, then I could race back, drop it off, and find another location quickly. I glanced at the Bogardus house. Nothing had moved. Maybe it would work, unprofessional as it was. Maybe I had been a security guard too long. “Listen, pops,” I said to the old man, “I don’t know nothing about this call, okay, but I’ll take a quick look at your set—I can’t promise to fix it here, may have to run it to the shop and pick up a loaner—”

“Don’t you ‘pops’ me, you big ugly bastard,” he grunted when he found his voice under the anger. He was giving away sixty pounds and twenty-some-odd years, but he didn’t care. Either I apologized, and quickly, or he was going to take a poke at me.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“My name is Abner Haynes,” he said, his fists still clenched. “Mr. Haynes to you, by God.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Haynes,” I said. “Now if I could take a look at your set?”

Abner shrugged and sighed, then led me toward his little frame house. The sidewalk in front of his yard, his walk and his porch steps had been shoveled often enough since the snow started so that they were bordered by substantial drifts, and the old man had carefully scattered rock salt on the concrete. The rose bushes by the porch had been pruned and wrapped in burlap, and even under the six inches of snow I could tell that Abner’s lawn lay as smooth and level as a golf green.

When I stepped out of the cold and into Abner’s living room, I broke into an immediate, showering sweat. I wiped my forehead and Abner chuckled.

“That old sawdust furnace works like a charm,” he said proudly. “Smells good and don’t smoke at all, and,” he added, “those goddamn environmentalists with their smoky wood stoves…Ha! Fools. Almost every house in the neighborhood had wood or sawdust furnaces when they were first built. Then all those fools who thought they was progressive, they switched to natural gas—ain’t nothing natural about burning something you can’t see or smell, something that’s as likely to turn a man’s house into kindling wood as keep it warm…”

Abner carried on about the state of the world and the nature of progress while I looked at the wall covered with framed pictures above the television set: Abner in his gandy dancer days, young and cocky, as lean and tough as the hickory handle of his pick, as sturdy as the stack of ties he leaned against in some mountain pass, his mustache as black as India ink and as big as the switch on a cow’s tail; Abner’s wedding picture with him standing a head shorter than his large blond wife; Abner as brakeman, fireman, conductor…Abner’s life captured in fading yellow prints.

“…so what’s with my TV?” he asked and tried to poke me in the ribs through the bulk of the snowmobile suit.

I didn’t have any idea—it looked as if the bottom half of the picture had folded itself halfway back up the tube—but I knew how to make it work long enough for me to move the van and take off those goddamned signs.

“Well, what you’ve got there, Mr. Haynes,” I said, “is an ABS forty-two-slash-eleven tube going bad on you, and I can tell you right now, sir, that I ain’t got one on the truck, maybe not even one in the shop—don’t get much call to work on that model these days—but I can make it work for a couple of hours, and I’ll put that tube on order just as soon as I get back to the shop.” Then I began to disconnect the set, wrapped the cord around it, and picked up the huge old-fashioned, misnamed “portable” color set.

“Where the hell you going with my TV?” he asked.

“Well, sir,” I grunted, “I’m gonna set it out on the porch here and let that ABS tube cool off—you see, when it gets too hot, the resistance builds up and it pulls off the aim of the gun—”

“The gun?” he interrupted.

“Trust me,” I said. “I’ll leave it outside while I finish my lunch, then at five to one I’ll carry it back inside and hook it up for you.” Abner looked extremely doubtful. “Believe me, sir, it’ll work,” I said. “One time I watched the whole second half of a Raider-Jets game sitting in a snowstorm with a garbage bag over the top of my set—”

“A garbage bag?”

“God’s truth,” I said, and it was.

“Well,” Abner said, tugging on the corner of his mustache, “I guess we can give it a try, but if it don’t work, I know Yvonne’ll sneak over to that damn Tyrone’s, even though he’s only got a black-and-white, to watch her soap…”

Abner opened the front door, still worrying, and I put the set down on the porch and headed for the van before he could find a new argument, promising to keep an eye on his TV while I finished my lunch.

Nothing had changed at the Bogardus house, and nothing happened while I waited. The whole neighborhood seemed frozen, still, except for two small children, who looked like bear cubs in their snowsuits, and a malamute pup playing in a yard down the street. At five to one I lugged the set back into Abner’s house and connected the antenna wires, and it worked like a charm. Once again I promised to order him a new tube, and Abner reached into his pocket and asked how much he owed me.

“On the house,” I said.

“Don’t need nobody’s charity,” he grumbled but left his hand in his pocket. “Thanks,” he added, and we shook hands.

“That’s some ’stache,” I said on the way out, and good old Abner grinned somewhere behind it.

I was halfway back in the van when a tiny old woman with a painted face that looked as if it had been left too long in the weather minced down the sidewalk toward Abner’s walk. She tried out a smile on me, an expression so coy and phony that not even a child would have fallen for it. Lord knows what a stand-up dude like Abner saw in a piece of fluff like that. Then I wondered if perhaps Abner and Sarah might want to double-date with Gail and me some night. I drove away, laughing.

My new location on the cross street didn’t give me quite as good a view. I couldn’t see the front door, but both vehicles were still parked in the driveway. Still more nothing with snow. If I decided to take Sarah’s job, I hoped the weather would clear by Thursday. The money would be great, but it seemed a little crazy to me. And when I worked for myself, I had done some insane shit—divorces and child custody cases so obscene and degrading that only a month of whiskey could get the taste out of my mouth; repossessions of everything from combines to tropical fish; and once I had flown to Hawaii to steal back a dual champion Labrador retriever at the Honolulu airport from a Japanese businessman who had stolen it from a Texan in southern Alberta. However strange the jobs had been, though, they had a purpose, and somehow the satisfaction of an old lady’s curiosity seemed a bit too eccentric for me.

It would be an easy job, sure, tagging two people who weren’t thinking about somebody tailing them—if they were worried about tails, they wouldn’t have met at the same place so many times—maybe too easy for a man of my talents…

But as I was complimenting myself, a police car pulled in behind the van, good old Abner glowering in the passenger seat. Nothing is ever simple or easy in my work. This took an hour to straighten out, an hour at the police station.

The colonel finally got Abner to stop shouting about lazy, crazy bastards who gave him a line of crap a mile long then set his TV out on the goddamned porch in the snow and call it fixed. He stopped because the colonel promised that Haliburton Security would buy him a new television set, which Mr. Milodragovitch would personally deliver the next morning. Then the colonel and Jamison both shook their heads and gave me the sort of look you give a puppy who brings back a dog turd instead of the stick. I even had to give Abner a ride back to his house. All the way, Abner kept his nose curled as if I was the dog turd.