From a Buick 8(99)

'Vacation,' Arky said. 'On my brudder's farm in Wisconsin. So dat was one mess someone else got to clean up.' He said this last with great satisfaction.

Eddie drove past, giving us a wave. We gave him a little right-back-atcha, Ned along with the rest of us. But he continued to look troubled.

'I gotta get it in gear, too,' Phil said. He disposed of his cigarette butt, got on his feet, hitched up his belt. 'Kiddo, leave it at this: your dad was an excellent officer and a credit to Troop D, Statler Barracks.' ?

'But I want to know ? '

'It don't matter what you want to know,' Phil told him gently. 'He's dead, you're not. Those are the facts, as Joe Friday used to say. G'night, Sarge.'

'Night,' I said, and watched the two of them, Arky and Phil, walk away together across the parking lot. There was good moonlight by then, enough for me to see that neither man so much as turned his head in the direction of Shed B.

That left Huddie, Shirley, and me. Plus the boy, of course. Curtis Wilcox's boy who had come and mowed the grass and raked the leaves and erased the snowdrifts when it was too cold for Arky to be outside; dirt's boy who had quit off the football team and come here instead to try and keep his father alive a little longer. I remembered him holding up his college acceptance letter like a judge holding up a score at the Olympics, and I was ashamed to feel angry with him, considering all that he'd been through and how much he'd lost. But he wasn't the only boy in the history of the world to lose his dad, and at least there'd been a funeral, and his father's name was on the marble memorial out front of the barracks, along with those of Corporal Brady Paul, Trooper Albert Rizzo, and Trooper Samuel Stamson, who died in the seventies and is sometimes known in the PSP as the Shotgun Trooper. Until Stamson's death, we carried out shotguns in roof-racks ? if you needed the gun, you just had to reach up over your shoulder and grab it. Trooper Stamson was rear-ended while parked in the turnpike breakdown lane, writing up a traffic stop. The guy who hit him was drunk and doing about a hundred and five at the moment of impact. The cruiser accordioned forward. The gas tank didn't blow, but Trooper Stamson was decapitated by his own shotgun rack. Since 1974 we keep our shotguns clipped under the dash, and since 1973 Sam Stamson's name has been on the memorial. 'On the rock,' we say. Ennis Rafferty is on the books as a disappearance, so he's not on the rock. The official story on Trooper George Morgan is that he died while cleaning his gun (the same Ruger that ended Mister Dillon's misery), and since he didn't die on the job, his name isn't on the rock, either. You don't get on the rock for dying as a result of the job; it was Tony Schoondist who pointed that out to me one day when he saw me looking at the names. 'Probably just as well,' he said. 'We'd have a dozen of those things out here.'

Currently, the last name on the stone is Curtis K. Wilcox. July 2001. Line of duty. It wasn't nice to have your father's name carved in granite when what you wanted ? needed ? was the father, but it was something. Ennis's name should have been carved there, too, so his bitch of a sister could come and look at it if she wanted to, but it wasn't. And what did she have? A reputation as a nasty old lady, that's what, the kind of person who if she saw you on fire in the street wouldn't piss on you to put you out. She'd been a thorn in our side for years and liking her was impossible but feeling sorry for her was not. She'd ended up with even less than this boy, who at least knew for sure that his father was over, that he was never going to come back in someday with a shamefaced grin and some wild story to explain his empty pockets and how come he had that Tiajuana tan and why it hurt like hell each time he had to make a little water.

I had no good feeling about the night's work. I'd hoped the truth might make things better (it'll set you free, someone said, probably a fool), but I had an idea it had made things worse instead. Satisfaction might have brought the curious cat back, but I could make out zero satisfaction on Ned Wilcox's face. All I saw there was a kind of stubborn, tired curiosity. I'd seen the same look on Curtis's face from time to time, most often when he was standing at one of Shed B's roll-up doors in that sidewalk superintendent's stance, ? legs apart, forehead to the glass, eyes squinted a little, mouth thoughtful. But what's passed down in the blood is the strongest chain of all, isn't it? What's mailed along, one generation to the next, good news here, bad news there, complete disaster over yonder.

I said, 'As far as anyone knows, Brian Lippy just took off for greener pastures. It might even be the truth; none of us can say different for certain. And it's an ill wind that doesn't blow somebody some good; him disappearing that way might have saved his girlfriend's life.'

'I doubt it,' Huddie rumbled. 'I bet her next one was just Brian Lippy with different-colored hair. They pick up guys who beat them until they go through the change. It's like they define themselves through the bruises on their faces and arms.'

'She never filed a missing-persons on him, tell you that,' Shirley said. 'Not one that came across my desk, anyway, and I see the town and county reports as well as our own. No one in his family did, either. I don't know what happened to her, but he was an authentic case of good riddance to bad rubbish.'

'You don't believe he just slipped out through that broken window and ran away, do you?' Ned asked Huddie. 'I mean, you were there.'