Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

Blood Stripe by William J. Carroll, Jr

The snowman was watching Mount Hood as if waiting for the dawn, with his head tipped slightly forward and leaning a little to the right, and as I jogged past the lookout point and the bench on which the snowman was sitting, I remember thinking that it must have taken a bit of work because the general anatomical detail — the size, shape, and attitudes of the head, trunk, and limbs — was unusually good.

Kids, I thought, but older ones. Clever ones. Maybe an artist among them.

Like Sandy.

Who did watercolors and played the violin and even wrote poetry...

Never mind!

I jogged on past the lookout, puffing steam, and determinedly put my thoughts back on keeping my pace steady.

I was moving downhill in semidarkness, a mile already from the cabin with another easy mile to the ranger station on the other side of Mount Fear. Then it was back and uphill all the way. I’d made the same run three days in a row and knew that finishing depended on my pacing myself on the downhill leg. I wanted to finish, so I shortened my stride and watched the road ahead, feeling pretty good just then, barely straining, wanting a cigarette but knowing I could do without... I’d quit a month ago.

Not for any of the usual, common-sense reasons people have for quitting, but I did quit and was past the edgy, craving stage and into a more relaxed, wouldn’t-a-cigarette-go-good-right-now phase that I could handle with my eyes closed. I just kept going, watching my street-light shadow emerge, lengthen, and disappear under my feet, then reappear, lengthen, and...

I wondered what Sandy was doing.

With her girlfriends down on the California Baja — she’d still be in bed, probably, dreaming young dreams, thinking nothing of me...

Never mind!

I pounded on, listening and watching for traffic as I ran because the narrow mountain road had just been plowed and the waist-high drifts on either side had made the road even narrower.

It was 0620 when I made the ranger station, where I turned around and started back up the way I’d come, the real punishment of my run ahead of me, asking myself every step of the way just what the hell I thought I was doing.

I was on leave, for God’s sake. Should be on a beach somewhere, relaxed and breathing easy.

But there I was, running up a mountain in the dead of winter, in total body agony and breathing like a steam engine...

I had no good answer for myself.

Something about turning over a new leaf, though. Making myself over. Becoming — I don’t know — a little less self-indulgent, a little more self-denying; a little less content with things as they were, a little more willing to risk what I was — or something.

The Winter of Virginiak’s Discontent?

No good answer, like I said, but...

It had something to do with Sandy.

I could never kid myself for very long about anything, and this was the no-mercy truth of it, even if I couldn’t find the words to make the connection between what I was doing to myself and...

Never mind!

I kept running.

Focused my eyes hard on the road at my feet, ignored the stitches in my back and side, the heaviness in my thighs, the stinging in my lungs, and kept moving, feeling the sweat start to puddle inside my clothes, thinking I was probably daring pneumonia, but knowing I wasn’t going to stop until...

The lookout loomed on my left, and I crossed the road to give the snowman a closer look because it had been well done and because it would take my mind off the pain for a second or two. Dawn was just beginning to break over Mount Hood in the east, and that in itself was worth a look. I was ten feet away from the bench when it finally hit me.

This was no snowman.

I came to a breath-heaving stop, took a moment to gather myself, then walked around to the front of the bench, squatted down, and peered up into the snow-frosted face of a dead man.

After a short, silent debate, I jogged back down to the ranger station to call the police. It was a bit closer than my cabin, and an easier run. There were a couple of houses in the general area, but there seemed no pressing reason to disturb anyone else’s early morning — the dead man was in no need of immediate attention.

So the ranger station it was. I made the call, then hiked back up to the lookout where the body still waited, its head tilted in a questioning attitude, and I waited with it, wondering what the question could have been.

Ten minutes later, a large black Land Rover sporting the logo of the Big Pine County Sheriff’s Department turned off the highway and stopped, and a deputy sheriff got out.

He noted the body, took a brief statement from me, asked a few short questions, told me I’d have to wait for the sheriff, then called for help, which arrived a little less quickly — another Land Rover, with more deputies and the black sedan of the county coroner, who began a lightfingered examination of the body.

I was asked a few more questions — actually the same ones — by one of the new deputies. A few more cars arrived — a reporter and a couple of gawkers — so the deputies left me alone and busied themselves keeping those people back, and then an ambulance pulled in and another sedan with four more deputies.

One of them cordoned off the area of the lookout with crime scene tape; one took pictures of the body, the bench, and the general area; one began a more heavy-handed examination of the corpse; and one asked me the same questions I’d answered twice before.

I was feeling chilled by then, and was getting a little irritated. I wanted to leave, but when I said so to the deputy, he said I’d have to wait for the sheriff, who was on the way, sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience.

Which left me stamping my feet and shivering and getting even more irritated for nearly half an hour.

I was just about to tell them I was leaving and the hell with it when somebody said, “Here’s the sheriff now.”

I looked where everyone else looked and saw a black, tinted window Trans Am turn into the lookout, pull over beside the ambulance, gun its engine once, and stop.

Finally!

The driver’s side door sprang open, and after a second or two, a tall woman wearing a black Stetson, sunglasses, a wool parka, bluejeans, and brown alligator cowboy boots got out and looked straight at me.

I came away from the lookout rail where I’d been standing and took a couple of steps in her direction because I wanted to get this over with fast, but stopped when she took off her glasses and grinned at me.

“Mr. Virginiak?” she said.

I gave her a face-placing frown — blonde, blue-eyed, tanned, freckled, mid-thirtyish face, good straight features. I took a step closer, then I had her name. “Captain Dilly!” I said with a laugh.

She came over to where I stood, and we shook hands.

“I’ll be damned,” she told me. “Small world.”

“It is that,” I agreed. “It’s good to see you.”

Dilly, Loretta, Captain, USAR.

Nearly three years now since I’d seen her last, and she looked quite the same except for the change of uniform.

Which was pretty damned good, actually.

During the Gulf War buildup, she’d been one of three reserve officers we’d gotten as replacements assigned to the 40th Army Counterintelligence Office at Fort Lewis. Of the three, and looks aside, she’d been the only one worth remembering.

She’d only worked for us a short while — not very much longer than the war itself — so I didn’t get to know her well, but she’d struck me as better-than-usual reservist material. I’d liked her and had been sorry when she was deactivated.

“You look different out of uniform,” I told her, tapping the eight-pointed silver star on her jacket. “And it’s Sheriff Dilly, eh?”

“That’s right,” she said archly, “so mind yourself. What are you doing here anyway?”

“I’m on leave,” I told her. “I’ve rented a cabin up the road.”

“Fear Mountain Lodges?” she asked in a mildly surprised way.

I nodded. “I was just out for a run this morning when I came across that.” I waved at the body on the bench.

She nodded to one of the deputies who was hovering nearby.

He came forward shaking his head. “I don’t know what this is, sheriff. No wallet. No I.D. A hundred and twenty and change in his jacket pocket.”

“Not robbery, then,” she said.

“Nope.”

“Anyone know who he is?”

“Not so far.”

She started toward the bench.

“There’s a good couple of inches of snow covering him,” the deputy continued, “so we know the body’s been here at least eight or nine hours. It didn’t start snowing up here until after ten last night, and it stopped around midnight.” He waved a hand at the coroner, who stood patiently near the body. “Dave says he can’t see any obtrusive marks on the body, but he can’t be sure until he gets it into the lab.”

Dilly squatted down in front of the frozen corpse and looked into his face. “Indian?” she said.

“Or Mexican,” the deputy suggested.

“Or Asian,” I offered.

She examined the body’s jacket, a thin windbreaker, stood up, and shook her head. “Looks like he just sat down and died.”

Dilly started giving orders then, brisk, sensible commands that got the crime scene work finished, the body bagged and on its way to the morgue, and several deputies on their way to question residents in the area.

She gave a brief statement to the reporter, who wanted and got her picture. When the last gawker had gone, she turned back to me and asked if I wanted a lift.

“So,” I said, once we were under way, “I seem to recall you were with the Portland P.D. when you got called up.”

Dilly nodded. “I quit to come up here about a month after I was separated from the army. I was senior deputy when the old sheriff died last month, so...” She shrugged.

“Blood stripe,” I said.

She laughed. “It may only be temporary,” she said. “They’re holding a special election in three months.”

“And you’ll be running?”

“Oh, I’ll be running, all right, but people around here have fixed ideas about what a sheriff is, and it isn’t female.” She paused. “It’s more like Attila the Hun in cowboy boots.”

I laughed. “So change their minds,” I suggested.

“I’m doing what I can, but...” She changed the subject to a “whatever-happened-to-what’s-his-name” and “is-so-and-so-still-around” routine that lasted until we reached the entrance of Fear Mountain Lodges, an array of log-walled, big-windowed cabins deployed over several acres of pine-decorated mountainside. I directed her over the road that switch-backed up the south face of the mountain and led to my cabin.

“You up here for the skiing?” she asked.

“That was the plan,” I told her. “A friend of mine was supposed to come up here with me and give me some lessons, but that didn’t work out.” I shrugged. “My deposit on the cabin was nonrefundable, so I just came ahead on my own. I’ve got two more weeks here. I figure I’ll try out one of the ski schools if they get an opening.”

“Look,” she said, “we’ll need you to come in to make a formal statement.”

“No problem.”

“This afternoon?”

I told her I’d be there and started out of the car, but she stopped me with a hand on my arm. “It really is nice seeing you again.”

“Same here,” I told her.

“I mean it,” she said in a way that was semi-invitational.

I gave her a smile and said, “So do I,” in a way that was semi-accepting.

Once in my cabin, I took a long, hot shower, made a pot of decaf in the small kitchenette, then sat and watched the view outside my window for a couple of hours, drinking pointless coffee and wondering, among other things, if I really should be as glad to see Dilly as I was.

In my usual frame of mind, it wouldn’t be something I’d give a lot of thought to, but I was not in my usual frame of mind.

I was, in fact, in an unusual frame of mind — my head full of odd worries and doubts, unsettling ideas about my life that I was having a hard time living with — so I did.

Give it a lot of thought, that is, and what I decided was that I couldn’t decide.

It seemed too fast, somehow. Too quick. I needed some time yet. Time to readjust. Time to get my head right. Time to get things in perspective.

But then...

Loretta Dilly was a very handsome woman.

And I was on leave, after all. I should be enjoying myself. Going with the flow. Having a good time. So what is your problem, Virginiak? Go for it. Take the plunge. Get back on the horse. Make hay while the sun shines...

But then...

And on and on, around and around, I got nowhere. About eleven o’clock, sick of myself, I got dressed.

Black cashmere sweater, gray whipcord trousers, white fleece-lined windbreaker, and a pair of soft black leather boots — all new to accoutre the new me.

Whoever or whatever I thought I was.

Then I took a stroll down the hill, past other cabins with their Volvos and BMW’s and Lexuses (Lexi?) parked out front, down to the highway where a large, rambling structure served as a combination office, sundry shop, restaurant, bar, and ski school.

I made it to the restaurant, where other men — mostly younger than I but dressed in rather the same way — and women, dressed a lot like Sandy would have been, sat and chatted over their meals in the same muted, churchlike tones — and there were no children.

I sat by myself, of course, and had the vegetarian special — a cup of celery soup and a tofu and beansprout sandwich; then I put myself and a cup of herbal tea on the second floor observation deck where I watched the broad, smooth expanse of snow-carpeted mountainside that was the southwest face of Mount Fear being slowly scarred by the long, crisscrossing trails of the dozens of skiers who were out that day — and wondered, for the umpteenth time that week, what I was doing there.

Fear Mountain Lodges.

In my usual frame of mind, I would have forfeited my deposit and stayed home as soon as I found out I was going to be stood up. It hadn’t been my idea to come here in the first place. It had been Sandy’s — she’d been here before — and I’d even balked a little because I knew I’d feel out of place, but I went along, finally, and then...

Well, in my usual frame of mind I would have just written it all off, but again, I wasn’t and I hadn’t, so there I was in a sort of yuppie winter haven that was costing me an arm and a leg and was way too rich for my blood, not my kind of place at all even if I did ski.

At least it wasn’t usually my kind of place, but then — maybe — now it was.

I didn’t know.

I’d quit smoking, started running, and sworn off caffeine and red meat, and I didn’t know the why behind those changes either.

I was becoming a mystery to myself.

I went on fretting about this and that and a thousand other things until I decided it was time to go to town, but to put myself in my place or something, I hiked back up to my cabin first where I put on my uniform, then walked back down to the highway.

I didn’t think I’d need to call for a cab because there was usually one parked outside the motel’s restaurant. It was there now, the driver lounging against the door reading a newspaper and smoking.

“You working?” I asked him.

“Better believe it,” he told me, popping open the back seat door for me, then scurrying around to his side and getting in himself. “Where to?” he asked.

“Big Pine.”

“Big Pine,” he echoed as he put the car in gear and started down the mountain. “Big Pine,” he said again as if enjoying the feel of the words in his mouth.

When we’d gone a short way he squinted into the rear view mirror and asked, “You a warrant officer?”

“That’s right,” I said.

He hmmphed. “Never could get army ranks straight,” he said. “Did my twenty in the Corps.”

“Really.”

“God’s truth,” he told me, then put a hand back over the seat for me to shake. “Name’s McConnel. Call me Mac.”

I shook his hand.

Mac was a short, compact little man, mid-fortyish, with his brown hair cut in a military crew. His face was a mask of outdoorsy wrinkles, and his eyes were sharp, darting things that looked like they didn’t miss much.

“You on leave?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Ski?”

“I’d planned on trying to.”

He shook his head. “Don’t ski myself,” he told me. “But it’s a great place for it, God’s truth — lookit that view.”

I looked where he pointed. “You from around here, Mac?”

“Bonneville,” he replied. “That’s up north here about thirty miles or so. When I got out, I decided I seen enougha the world, y’know? So I came back.”

He followed the pine-walled highway through some turns. “Beautiful country up here.”

“It is,” I agreed.

He sighed. “Been driving this hack since ’85.”

“Really.”

“God’s truth. Retirement money’s good, but I been putting some away to open a bar.”

“Oh?”

“Yep. Just about there, too.”

He made another turn that set us on the long series of switchbacks that would take us down to the foothills of the mountain. He was quiet while negotiating them. Once we were out of the switchbacks, he said. “Yep. Can’t drive a hack forever. Always wanted my own bar.” He flicked a glance at me in the rear view. “People figure a guy drivin’ a hack don’t make hardly nuthin’, but I’ll tell you somethin’ soldier to soldier.”

I put an interested look on my face.

“I bring down close to four, five thousand a month in winter.”

“Really.”

“God’s truth. I figure another five, six months I can put a hundred thou down on a little place just southa town I know about. Get her fixed up.” He grinned at me in the mirror. “Gonna call it Mac’s Tavern.”

I nodded and smiled and listened while he yammered on, down through the small foothills and into the valley, where the road angled back toward Mount Fear, giving us a spectacular view.

“This really is God’s country, pal,” Mac told me with a Chamber of Commerce sincerity. “Believe it.”

I told him I would, but, after he entered the outskirts of the town, I had some doubts.

Big Pine was not so much a town as a collection of familiar franchise shops crowded along both sides of the highway at the base of the mountain. As Mac drove us along Main Street, past stores with names that echo in shopping malls in every corner of the country, I had a familiar, wistful sense that I was seeing a kind of retailing virus that was growing out across America, killing the hometown feel to places like Big Pine.

Mallitis americanus or something.

Higher up along the mountainside I could see the principal residential area — small, wood-framed houses, uniformly white and crowded by pine. Compared to Main Street, they looked like part of the natural landscape.

“So where do I drop ya?” Mac asked.

“Sheriff’s office.”

At the end of Main Street he parked in front of a newish single-storied building that advertised itself as the Big Pine Sheriff’s Station.

He told me the fare, which I paid. As I got out, he nodded toward the building and said, “You have some trouble or something?”

“I hope not,” I said. “I found a body this morning, up on the lookout on the other side of the mountain.”

He gave me an open-mouthed stare. “A body?”

“God’s truth,” I told him.

Loretta met me in the large, busy outer office of the sheriff’s station and led me down a hall to her own office, where she told me to have a seat. She picked up a phone and ordered a stenographer while I looked the place over.

It took some looking.

It was a big, windowless room, pine-paneled and — floored in glossy hardwood, but as big as it was, it was made close by the furnishings: a large oak desk with black leather chairs behind and in front; wall-mounted animal heads, mostly of protected species; framed photographs of men with their feet on dead prey; flags in two corners; and guns of every type and calibre, in and out of cases, everywhere — a combination trophy room and armory.

Daniel Boone and George Patton would have felt right at home.

“Nice office,” I said to Dilly when she hung up.

She laughed and made a face. “Sheriff Barrel was a man’s man. I haven’t had much of a chance to give it my imprint.”

“Sheriff Barrel?”

She lightly slapped the arms of the chair in which she was sitting. “He died right in this chair,” she told me. “Heart attack.”

“You look right at home.”

She missed the irony. “The County Council doesn’t think so. Not that they had much choice in appointing me acting sheriff.”

“They were reluctant?”

“Reluctant!” She laughed. “I had to tell them I’d sue them silly if they didn’t.”

“What are your chances of keeping the job?”

“Slim.” She frowned at a spot in space over my head. “I have to show them I can be...”

The stenographer came in just then, and Dilly led me through a short, businesslike Q and A. When the steno had departed to type up my statement, I said, “Any luck in identifying the body?”

“Not yet, but sooner or later we’ll get a line. The autopsy will be done this afternoon.” She smiled. “Um... this— Mend of yours. The one who was going to teach you to ski?”

“Sandy,” I said, “Something came up, and she couldn’t make it.”

“So — are you going steady or something?”

“No. You?”

“Married to the job.”

I nodded. “Well...” I said, but I got no further.

Dilly sat and smiled steadily at me.

And after a very long moment, I laughed and said, “Nice office.”

The stenographer came back then, and I signed three copies of my statement. When she’d left again, there was a mixed feel to things, and I started feeling foolish.

“Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it,” I said, making getting up motions.

“What are you doing tonight?” she asked.

I shrugged and said, “This is your town, Loretta.”

So we made some plans, dinner and whatever that night; then I left and spent the next hour or so strolling through the town, popping in and out of stores that had that familiar franchise feel to them, trying not to overthink my situation, trying not to think about the what ifs and maybes and whys that circled inside my head like birds of prey.

But in one of the stores I entered, I saw a girl who reminded me of Sandy.

So much so, in fact, that I furtively followed her for a short while until I thought I might frighten her. I quit it, telling myself to grow up.

But I strolled on, enjoying the fresh, high-country air. After making a turn or two, I eventually found the real town of Big Pine.

Or what had to have been the old town, a block behind what had become the new main street, on the mountain side of the highway. It was a dead area of boarded-up buildings with dilapidated signs like Bill’s Hardware, Dave’s TV & Appliances, and Bea’s Luncheonette hanging every which way in sad neglect.

I caught a look at myself in the dark, dirty window of what had been Mel’s Grocery, and despite the new me, I had the chicken-skin feeling I was home.

Which did little to lighten my mood.

After another half hour’s walk, I took a mountain shuttle bus back to my cabin and spent the rest of the afternoon inside, fretting some more about the wisdom of dating too soon and watching Oprah.

With women who hate their bodies.

Dilly was prompt and looked great in a black dress and white leather jacket. She drove us down off the mountain, through Big Pine and all the way to the outskirts of Portland — which seemed a long way to go for dinner, but this was her neck of the woods so I didn’t question it — to a steak-house she told me was the best in the Northwest. She had an inch thick New York cut, and I had fish.

Which wasn’t half-bad.

Later, over coffee (mine decaf, hers straight) and cigarettes (hers Benson & Hedges, mine merely memories), she remarked, “You’re more health-conscious than I remember.”

“A little,” I agreed.

“A little!” she laughed. “You used to smoke like a chimney.”

“I quit just recently.”

“And ordering fish in a steakhouse,” she went on with an amused lilt, “is like asking for smoked baby dolphin hearts in a vegetarian diner.”

I laughed.

“I mean it,” she said. “You’re a lot different now.”

I didn’t know exactly how to respond, so I didn’t. Instead I cocked my head toward the sounds of an electronically assisted country and western band that were coming from another part of the building and asked if she wanted to dance.

Which she did. We followed the music, but the dancefloor was packed, so we took a table and watched while the band performed. When they were done, we danced to a couple of slow ballads from the jukebox.

Back at our table, over a couple of light beers, she said, “I’m having a good time.”

“So am I,” I told her.

She laughed again shortly, then said, “Would you believe I haven’t been out on a date for almost a year?”

I cocked my head. “Why is that?”

“No opportunities,” she said without conviction.

“Really.”

She made a face, sipped at her beer, then sat back and said, “I’ve wanted to be in law enforcement all my life. And I have been. My first job after college was with the Portland P.D. — first parking control and then in records.” She smiled ruefully. “Meter maid, then clerk.

“I came up here three years ago,” she went on, “thinking things would be different, but Barrel had me on radio for the first year. He only let me go out on road patrol after I threatened to sue him.

“So,” she said. “I learned the lesson. As a woman, if I want to get ahead in this line of work, I have to be more of a man than most men.”

I frowned at her. “So — you haven’t dated?”

“It would have compromised me,” she said. “The image I need to cultivate.”

I laughed. “Until I came along and destroyed your will to resist.”

She laughed back. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it’s hard keeping up the act.”

I sipped at my beer and sat back feeling very relaxed.

“How about you?” Dilly asked.

“How about what?”

“That friend of yours?” she said. “The one who was going to teach you how to ski.”

“Oh,” I said, putting a small smile on my face. “Sandy.”

Loretta nodded expectantly.

I sighed. “Well, she’s a lieutenant,” I said. “And she’s a little young for me, I guess.”

I see.

“I suppose we really never should have gotten involved. So we’ve... decided to call it off.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No big thing,” I told her.

“How do you feel about it?”

I put a mild look of concentration on my face. “I don’t really know.”

“Why?” Dilly asked.

“Why?”

She opened her mouth to rephrase the question but changed her mind. “Never mind,” she said with a smile. “None of my business.”

I made myself laugh. “I suppose,” I said, “it’s because I’m not letting myself think about it.”

“Why not?”

“I’m — on leave,” I replied stupidly.

“I see,” she said. “So, you’re just — on cruise control or something?”

“Something like that.”

She gave me a knowing kind of look then, and I thought she was going to ask more about it, but thank God, she dropped it.

We chatted a bit more about nothing much at all, but the psychochemistry of our species was hard at work; so when the place closed, on our way back to her car, Dilly and I held hands, and once we were inside, we kissed, and after we were on the highway, headed toward Big Pine, the sense that things were going too fast for me became acute and I didn’t really know what to do about it.

Which is something one expects more from a teenage girl than a forty-three-year-old man, but there it was.

I was confused.

This hadn’t been something I’d anticipated. Or rather it hadn’t been something I’d thought through. This was crazy. I needed to think about this. I needed to...

“I don’t know what we’re doing,” Dilly murmured, half to herself.

“I’m not that certain myself,” I admitted.

She glanced at me. “You’re a sweet man, Virginiak,” she said, putting a hand on my knee.

I took her hand in my own — and felt even more confused.

“So,” she said. “What now?”

I was still thinking it over like an idiot — still holding her hand but still thinking it over — when, a mile or so south of Big Pine, Daly’s radio chirped, and she called in.

“We got a 10–11, at Fremont’s Leather Shop in town, sheriff,” a woman’s voice told her. “Happened fifteen minutes ago.”

“Tell me, Mavis,” Dilly ordered.

“Suspect is male,” Mavis replied, “Indian, eighteen to twenty years old. About five ten, one seventy-five, black hair. He’s wearing a gray sweatshirt, khaki trousers, and a black cloth hat. Last seen heading north down along the old rail line.”

“What’d he take?”

“A thousand dollar coat, the owner said. Black leather and seal fur. Said he just came in and grabbed it off a store mannequin and took off.”

“Who’s responding?”

“Jerry is at the scene, Tom and Frank are cruising down around the old warehouses.”

Dilly gave me a questioning look, and I shrugged.

“I’m on the job, Mavis,” Dilly told her. “Tell Frank and Tom I’ll work up along the old river road toward them.”

“Roger that,” Mavis replied.

Dilly hung up her mike, then turned to me and said. “A 10–11 is shoplifting, but a thousand dollar pricetag makes it robbery one.” She gave me a questioning squint. “You don’t mind, do you?”

I told her I didn’t, feeling curiously relieved.

About a mile farther on, Dilly turned off the highway, crossed a bridge, and put us on a snow-covered road that edged a frozen river on the right and a railroad track that ran beside a steep-sided rocky hill on the left.

“If he’s come this way, he’s trapped himself,” she told me as she slowed down and killed her lights. “The river ice won’t hold a man’s weight, so we should have him boxed.”

She drove ahead by moonlight at about fifteen miles an hour, watching the road and track, which curved northwesterly toward Big Pine. The sky was jet black but bright with stars, and a new moon hung over the peaks to the north.

“Should spot him any minute now,” she murmured as she inched the Trans Am forward. “Any minute,” she repeated softly.

We’d been at it for about five minutes and could just make out the lights of the town about a mile ahead and to the right when the dark figure of a man appeared, hunch-shouldered, walking along the track.

“There he is!” she exclaimed, calling it in on the radio immediately.

The man spotted our car an instant later and started down off the tracks heading toward the iced-over river, but Dilly turned on her brights and stabbed the accelerator, which effectively cut him off from that route. He turned, got back up on the tracks, and started running back in the direction of town.

We paralleled his progress on the lower road for about a minute, but he stopped suddenly as the lights of two vehicles ahead — Frank’s and Tom’s, presumably — came into view, one on the tracks, and one on the road ahead of us.

“Stay put, okay?” Dilly told me as she stopped the car. She reached into the glove compartment, bringing out a 9mm Beretta, then gave me a brief smile as she jerked the door open and got out.

The man, who was then about ten yards away, was facing the other two cars and looking indecisive.

“You!” Dilly shouted at him. “Hey, you!”

The man spun around to face her. His eyes were wide and wild.

“You stay right where you are!” Dilly told him with force, pointing the weapon in his direction. “I mean it!”

The man looked left, right, then back at Dilly.

“Kneel down,” Dilly told him as she took a couple of steps up the incline. “Put your hands behind your head, and don’t do anything stupid.”

The man turned in the other direction as Frank and Tom got out of their cars.

“Did you hear me?” Dilly shouted angrily.

The man, who seemed young and scared, looked back at her.

“Kneel down, put your hands behind your head, and don’t do anything...”

Stupid! I thought as the young man bolted.

Stupid!

Down off the tracks, he started a slip-sliding run toward the river. Dilly, moving awkwardly in her high heels, stepped over to intercept him, but he was a lot stronger, or a lot more desperate than she probably thought, because he ran straight over her, knocking them both down.

Right, I thought. Great.

I started out of the car, hearing Dilly curse as she struggled with the man on the ground, hearing Frank and Tom shouting things as they charged forward. I’d just made it around the door to the front of the car when the man, not ten feet away, stood up, whirled around, and ran blindly straight toward me.

Probably because the bright lights of the Trans Am were in his face, I don’t think he ever saw me because as he blundered in my direction I tripped him easily, sending him face first in a sprawling heap into a drift of snow, and it was over.

Virginiak — Man of Action.

Dilly, who was uninjured, save her dignity and a broken thumbnail, handcuffed the young man roughly, retrieved the coat he’d dropped in their brief struggle, and, despite the fact that it made no sense to me or to her deputies, put both in the back of her own car, telling the deputies that she would handle things from there on. A few minutes later we were back on the highway, headed toward Big Pine.

“Damn,” Dilly muttered, sucking her thumb.

“Where are you taking me?” the man in back asked her.

“Where do you think?” she replied angrily.

I heard him take a few sharp breaths. “I don’t wanna go to jail,” he moaned in a little-boy voice. “Please?”

I looked back at him and saw him holding his head in his hands.

He was young, younger than I first had thought, with long black hair that he wore straight. He was flat-featured, a little pudgy, and very frightened.

“What’s your name?” Dilly asked.

“Charley White Hand,” he said softly. “I live over in Bull Run.”

Dilly looked at me and said, “Reservation.” She squinted at him in the rear view mirror. “How old are you, Charley?”

“Eighteen,” he said, glancing at me. “I’m sorry.”

Dilly snorted.

“I don’t wanna go to jail,” he moaned again. “Please?”

“Knock it off, Charley.”

“Please?”

Dilly gave him a hard look in the mirror. “Well, I’ll tell you, Charley,” she said. “That’s a thousand dollar coat you stole...”

“I’m sorry...”

“...which is grand larceny...”

“I’m so sorry...”

“...which is good for three to ten in the state prison.”

“Oh God no, please...”

“And you’ve assaulted a peace officer, which in this state means a mandatory three years.”

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m really sorry...”

“Are you listening to this, Charley?”

He shook his head but he was listening.

“Now, you say you don’t want to go to jail,” she went on, “but answer me this, Charley.”

He blinked at the back of her head.

“Just where the hell,” Dilly blurted, “did you think you were going to end up?”

“Please...”

Dilly made a sound of disgust.

“Please!”

Dilly shook her head.

“The coat was for my grandfather...”

She laughed archly. “Very thoughtful of you, Charley.”

“He’s old,” he explained. “He lives up on Raining Ridge. All by himself. It’s a cold winter, sheriff. He can’t go outside it’s so cold. He needed a coat...”

“Are you trying to break my heart, Charley?” Dilly asked.

He started to explain further but gave it up and put his face in his hands once again.

He looked even younger then than he had a moment before.

And Dilly looked... cold.

Back at the Big Pine sheriff’s station, Dilly parked on the street in front, grabbed a nightstick from under her seat, got out, and hauled the young man from the car.

“Please. Please. Please,” Charley White Hand moaned, over and over as she started him toward the front stairs.

“Move it, Charley!” she snapped, prodding him in the back with the stick.

I’d gotten out of the car myself by then and followed them.

At the stairs, Charley hung back, and Dilly had to nudge him a bit more to start him up toward the big glass door.

“Come on. Come on!” Dilly ordered.

And Charley moved, but slowly.

Up the stairs to the door, where just inside, behind a counter, several deputies were waiting with small smiles on their faces.

“Dammit!” I heard Dilly mutter. “Dammittohell!”

Through the door then, and I was a few steps behind, and the young man was still dragging his feet, but putting up no real struggle, into the small reception area.

Where Dilly pushed him forward toward the counter as I turned to close the door...

“Goddammit!” Dilly shouted suddenly. “You sonofabitch!”

And I looked back in time to see her, grabbing the boy by his collar, swing him around and bounce him hard against a wall. “You little bastard!” she snarled as she did it again. “You punk!” she growled as she rapped him across the backs of his knees with her nightstick. “You sonofabitch!” she spat as she watched him collapse in a pile on the floor.

“Loretta!” I said sharply.

“Damn,” she breathed angrily, standing over him.

“Loretta?” I said again, moving toward her.

She ignored me, glaring down at the boy, nightstick held in a daring-him-to-move-an-inch way.

“Loretta?” I said a final time, close enough now so if she’d made another move on the boy I could have taken that damned stick away.

“Damn,” she said again, but the show was over.

She tossed the nightstick clatteringly across the counter. “Book him,” she said breathlessly to one of the now unsmiling deputies on the other side. “Robbery one and assaulting a peace officer — and get him out of my sight.”

Which they did.

A limp-bodied, whimpering little boy — around the counter, down some stairs, out of sight.

And as they took him away, Dilly, her face flushed, her eyes slightly glazed, looked at me, and some of the shock in my own face reflected suddenly in her own.

Which quickly transformed into a hard, what-do-you-know-about-it look.

Which put me in my place, I suppose.

But settled any confusion I’d felt earlier.

Half an hour later, back in Billy’s Trans Am, on the way up the mountain to my cabin, the relaxed, warm feeling that had grown up between Dilly and me had evaporated.

The sky had gone to a dull gray-black, heavy with sudden clouds, and it was quite cold now, inside and out. It was a long, quiet drive, all the way.

When we arrived at my cabin, Dilly parked, sagged back in her seat, and said, “So — where were we?”

I looked at her. “Nowhere, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “That kid was really scared.”

“So?”

“So, you were pretty damn rough with him.”

Her eyes glittered with sudden anger. “Oh?”

I looked back at her, not with any anger of my own but with a genuine question.

“Look,” she said grimly. “I’m the law in this county. You know what that means?”

I shrugged.

She sighed. “We don’t have a lot of crime up here,” she told me. “But what we do have is usually violent, and that means I’ve got to be somebody that people look to as the damned cavalry. As somebody they can trust to keep them safe, and if that means being a little rough on a perpetrator now and then, that’s how it is.”

I said nothing, and the air seemed colder.

“I’ll tell you something,” she continued. “What I did back there at the station will be breakfast gossip around town tomorrow morning, and do you know what they’ll be saying?” She nodded with certainty. “They’ll be saying, ‘Whew. That Sheriff Dilly is one mean bitch, isn’t she? Don’t want to get on the wrong side of her, no sir. Barrel knew what he was doing when he hired her, I’ll say. She might make a good sheriff after all, she might.’ ”

“So,” I said. “When you bounced that little boy off the wall, you were making a political statement, is that it?”

“In more ways than one,” she said, in a take-it-or-leave-it way.

I nodded and decided to leave it. And she nodded back and said, “So — I guess we’re still nowhere.”

I opened the door of the car and stood outside saying, “I have my own problems, Loretta.”

“I’ll say you do,” she muttered angrily.

She gunned her car’s engine and spun quickly out of sight, down the road to the highway.

Leaving me standing and staring after her.

Sleep that night was a long time coming, and not as restful as it should have been. The cabin creaked under the strain of the wind, waking me up half a dozen times, leaving me awake to think about the things I’d wanted to avoid thinking about but now I couldn’t.

Something about Dilly reflected something about me, and suddenly a lot of what had mystified and confused me became clear — and I was very uncomfortable with myself.

The Winter of Virginiak’s Discontent continued.

In any case, sleep was a hard job that night, but as hard as it was, getting up the next day was even tougher, and when I got up finally, around nine o’clock, a blizzard was blowing its head off outside, so I passed on my morning run, started a blaze going in the fireplace, put myself in a big easy chair in the front room, and spent the day reading.

The Genealogy of Morals.

A book I’d skimmed in college but always intended to reread, and now found almost compelling.

Something about its contempt, its merciless appraisals, struck home again and again, and I couldn’t put it down.

And so I passed the day quietly — albeit thinking disparaging thoughts about my bourgeois neighbors. Around five P.M., with a feeling of self-mockery I couldn’t shake, I finally showered, shaved, and got dressed and hiked the two hundred yards or so through a heavy fall of wet snow to the motel restaurant where I had filet mignon, baked potato, broccoli in hollandaise, and a couple of Heinekens.

Which left me feeling, if not quite a “superman,” at least not the “sick animal” I’d been.

Dr. Nietzsche’s Midlife Crisis Remedy.

After dinner I considered getting mellow in the bar but decided enough was enough for one day — a prudent man takes Nietzsche in small doses, I thought — so I settled for espresso and a local newspaper in the lookout lounge.

Where I read articles about Billy’s arrest of Charley White Hand the night before — which characterized Dilly as “tough,” and White Hand as “desperate” and “violent” — and about the efforts of the local law to identify the body I’d found the previous morning — which were characterized as “ongoing” but “lacking results.”

Which, aside from a lot of talk about the weather — the promise of snow and the lengthening of the ski season occupying most of the front page — was all the news in Big Pine fit to print.

What else would there be?

Putting aside the paper, I people-watched for another half hour before I started getting bored, making up my mind that if I stayed on the full two weeks I would damn sure rent a car because this was not my kind of place and these were not my kind of people. Then I hiked back up to my cabin.

Where Dilly, dressed in her sheriff’s outfit, was waiting in her car.

“Hi,” she said tentatively, getting out as I walked up to her.

I nodded and waved a hand to my door, then led her inside, and once we were there she said, “We’ve just tentatively I.D.’d the body you found the other day.”

“Oh?”

“He seems to be a Vietnamese named Doan. He drove a taxi down in Portland. We found his car in a gully about ten miles north of Big Pine. Wallet and I.D. were in the glove compartment.”

“I see.”

“I’m on my way to see his wife — to tell her — and bring her in to make a formal I.D.” She shrugged. “I thought you might come along, unless you’re... busy, or...”

I told her I’d be glad to tag along.

Once in her car and on our way down the mountain, she said, “I feel bad about last night.”

“So do I,” I admitted.

She sighed raggedly. “I was way out of line.”

“Out of control,” I said.

She looked at me sharply as if to argue but then nodded. “You’re right. Out of control.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have pushed that kid around. I know.” She looked at me again. “That’s not me, really.” She laughed ruefully. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I said, “You’re trying to be something you’re not.”

“I suppose.”

“Like me, I guess.”

Dilly frowned at me.

I sighed and stared out at the black night world for a moment. “Last night,” I said, “I had a good long think about how I feel, and I decided I feel pretty rotten, actually. Sandy is twenty-three,” I told her. “About half my age, and... it was not a mutually arrived at decision to break up. It was her idea, and the issue was age.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not so broken up over our breaking up as I am over being so damned old all of a sudden.”

“You’re not old.”

“When you get a look at yourself through the eyes of someone twenty years younger, you’ll know what I mean.”

She thought that over, then said, “Hmmmm.”

I nodded. “Anyway,” I went on, “I’ve been putting myself through some hoops lately. Trying to make myself over into someone — with a more youthful outlook or something.”

She went quiet for a moment, then said, “You quit smoking and turned vegetarian.”

“I’ve also started running, getting in shape...”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“No,” I agreed, “but it’s a front. A way to kid myself. The point is, I have to learn to live with my age, whatever it is. And you have to live with yourself,” I told her. “Be the kind of law officer you are.”

“I know,” she said with a hint of hopelessness. “But that’s the kind of law people around here expect.”

“You could change their expectations,” I said. “You said before you hadn’t made your mark yet. Well, make it.”

She laughed. “That’s easy to say...”

“Loretta, this isn’t the nineteenth century, and you’re not Wyatt Earp, so quit pretending. Be the new sheriff in town.”

She had nothing to say to that, and I was done preaching, so I settled back and let her think.

Loretta drove us into Portland, through a semithriving business section and into a not so thriving semiresidential area where we eventually found the right street of older, two and three story buildings, store-fronted, apartment-topped, with cars parked at every inch of available curb space.

We parked about a block away and walked back, checking the numbers on the buildings. We found the right one at the end of a wide, dead-end alley. Overhead, dark laundry hung from lines that crisscrossed between buildings; it waved like black pennants in some ancient battle in the stormy night sky.

There was the heavy odor of drying squid in the air.

The building we entered was fronted by a small store that advertised fresh fish, but once we were inside and out on the stairs there was some room for doubt about the claim.

“This is not a haunt of the rich and famous,” said Loretta as we climbed the stairs.

The second floor hall was narrow and rather dark, and we had to flick lighters before the doors to read the numbers.

The right apartment was at the end of the second floor hall, where, in response to Loretta’s knock, the door opened the length of the double chain-lock and a pair of curious brown eyes peered up at us.

“Is your mother home?” Loretta asked the little boy.

Another pair of eyes, these about a foot higher up, came to the door.

“I’m Sheriff Dilly, ma’am.” She held her I.D. up to the woman, who frowned at it. “From Big Pine. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The little boy said something in Vietnamese, and the woman appeared startled. The door closed, there was some whispered conversation behind it, then it opened all the way, and the little boy scampered out and down the hall in his pajamas.

The woman, thirtyish, tiny, dark-haired, and pretty, was holding a sleeping infant against one shoulder. She stood back from the door and nodded and smiled us inside.

The dimly lit studio was small, sparsely furnished, but pin-neat except for the walls, which were covered with the crayon drawings of a child, who might have been one or all of the three children, aged three to six, who were sprawled on a floor mat in front of a flickering black and white TV, and whose eyes followed Loretta and me as we stepped inside.

The woman said something, and the TV was turned off.

“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Loretta told her, “but do you know a Long Van Doan?”

The woman smiled and shook her head. “No speak,” she said, and pointed to the hall.

Loretta smiled and nodded back, then said to me, “How’s your Vietnamese?”

Not as good as it had been, but I gave it a try, asking her what Dilly had asked and getting a lengthy reply I only partly understood.

I turned to Loretta. “It’s the wife. Her name is Tuyet Le. I didn’t catch the rest of what she said. It’s been a while.”

“Well...”

Just then a short, fat woman of about forty bustled into the room from the hall and grinned some gold at us. “Hi!” she said. “I Dao Thi. I help talk, okay.”

Loretta said, “Thank you.”

Dao Thi pointed to the other woman. “This wife for Long Van Doan. She name Tuyet Le.” She then said something to Tuyet Le, who replied with her eyes downcast. “She say she no see husband three, four day now. She say he go out, no come back.”

Loretta glanced at me, then back at the fat woman. “Is there someone who can watch the children?” she asked gently. “I think her husband may be dead and I want to take her down to the police station to look at the body.”

The woman’s eyes got big, but when she told Tuyet Le what Loretta had said, she seemed to take it matter-of-factly.

It was how they always seemed to take it.

As we waited for the fat woman’s mother to come to watch the children, however, tears began to leak down over Tuyet Le’s cheeks, and they didn’t stop for the rest of that night.

An old woman came, and Loretta and I quietly joked with the kids while their mother got ready. The oldest boy, who told us he was seven, looked like a miniature version of the corpse on the Mount Fear lookout bench, only alive — and about to age a lot faster than he should have.

Tuyet Le asked no questions while we were in the apartment, but once the four of us were in the car and on the way out of Portland, she began to talk from the back seat in a low monotone. Loretta asked Dao Thi, who sat beside her, what she was saying.

“Too much,” replied the fat woman. “She tell everything happen she and family.”

“Tell me.”

The woman sighed. “She say, come to United States two year ago. Stay camp in Thailand ten year, then come here two year ago. Whole family, come stay Texas. You know Texas? I have sister stay Texas. She no like, but husband no like come here.”

“What else does she say?”

She said something to Tuyet Le, who replied at length. “She say she and husband go stay Texas. He got brother stay Texas, too, but people no like, you know? Get fight all the time. People no like Vietnamese people come stay. Lotta trouble. Somebody set fire his boat.” She squawked a question at Tuyet Le, who replied quietly. “She say husband like have fishing boat, but people no like him have. Plenty trouble. Somebody set fire his boat. Tell him get out Texas, or maybe kill him. She say they go move stay San Diego. She have sister stay San Diego. Husband try to drive taxi, but get more trouble. Somebody beat him up, take money all the time. So sad story, you know? Get one baby die in Texas. One baby die San Diego. So sad, you know?”

Loretta glanced at me, then back at the road. “Very sad,” she said.

“She say they go move stay San Francisco,” the woman went on. “Husband try plenty job, but all the time get trouble. Somebody all the time want cheat him. Want fight with him. Tell him go back Vietnam. Go back Vietnam. All the time.”

“Does she say anything about having trouble here?” asked Loretta.

She spoke again with Tuyet Le. “She say they come here last month. She no like come — too cold, you know. She like go back San Diego, but he like come Portland. Drive taxi, and she scared stay San Francisco by herself. She want have restaurant in San Diego. Got plenty restaurant in San Diego. She want have one too, but never enough money to start. Husband want to save money for buy restaurant, but so hard, you know?” She spoke some more with Tuyet Le, then made sounds of exasperation. “You know what she say?”

“What?” Loretta asked.

Dao Thi sighed. “She say no have insurance, so what she gonna do now, husband die.” Neither of us had an answer to that, so we gave none.

The morgue, it turned out, was an adjunct of the Big Pine hospital. Once we were inside, Loretta took a still weeping but somewhat composed Tuyet Le by the arm, down the hall and to the cold room at the back of the building where her husband waited for her in a refrigerated drawer and where no translations were needed.

Five minutes later when they returned, Tuyet Le’s crying had become hysterical, and she’d begun talking wildly. Nothing Dao Thi said had any effect.

But then words seldom do in cases like that.

And then she semicollapsed, so we took her into the hospital and explained the situation to the head nurse, who led Tuyet Le to a room with a bed, where after a while she seemed to calm down.

In the hall outside, while a doctor looked in on her, Dao Thi told us, “She say she get fight with husband. Last time look at him, she mad with him for come to Portland. She tell him get out. She say so sorry now. She say she wanna die, too.” The woman sighed and looked at me. Her own eyes were wet. “So sad story, yah?”

I told her it was.

“So sad story,” she repeated softly to Loretta.

Who nodded and said, “Sad story.”

Things sorted out, after a bit, with Tuyet Le staying where she was for the night and Dao Thi staying with her, and then Loretta and I were back in her car and on our way back to my cabin.

“Poor woman,” she said as we headed out of town. “What will she do?”

I didn’t know, and said so.

“Poor woman,” Dilly murmured again. “I wonder...”

The radio in her dashboard came to life just then, and she answered it.

“Sheriff,” the metallic female voice told her, “you’d better get back to the station ASAP.”

“What is it, Mavis?” Dilly asked with mild irritation.

“Um... you’d just better get back right away.”

“Mavis?”

There was a slight hesitation, then Mavis said, “We got trouble, sheriff. Bad trouble.”

Loretta looked like she was about to question Mavis further, but she didn’t. She looked at me instead.

I gave her a no-problem shrug, and she smiled, turned the car around, and said, “I may have to put you on the payroll.”

I shook my head. “No way,” I told her. “Too many crises.”

Outside the sheriff’s station an ambulance and the county coroner’s sedan were parked.

There were also the same reporter I’d seen the other day up on the mountain and a small crowd of people being held back on either side of the door by a brace of stone-faced deputies.

“What the hell is this?” Loretta muttered. She stepped on the gas suddenly and drove past the station, making a couple of squealing turns that took us into a small parking lot at the rear of the building.

As we stepped inside the back entrance, a deputy came up to her, gave me an apologetic look, and asked to speak with Loretta alone. The two of them went into her office.

I strolled down the hall to the large front office, which was oddly quiet given the fact that there were a half-dozen other people there. They were speaking in whispers, as if embarrassed about something, and I sat down to wait.

I could hear other voices coming from the downstairs cell-block, but I couldn’t make out what was being said.

I could hear raised voices from outside on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t hear them well, either.

After a while the deputy who’d spoken with Loretta came out, looking worried, but he said nothing to me, so I sat and waited some more.

But then, when it seemed like a very long time, I got up and went down the hall to Loretta’s office and found her sitting behind the large oak desk, staring at nothing, with a look of blank astonishment on her face.

“Loretta?”

She blinked at me.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She stared at me for a long moment, then swallowed and looked away again.

I came up close to the desk. “What is it, Loretta?”

“Charley White Hand,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

Oh no, I thought.

She took a few hard breaths, then frowned up at me. “He hanged himself in his cell.”

Which was the perfectly depressing end to a perfectly depressing night.

I tried to comfort her, because I could see she was taking it as hard as she should, but she’d crawled into an emotional carapace that I couldn’t crack through, and then people started to arrive — the boy’s family, looking stunned and solemn, two county council members, looking politically solicitous, and the county coroner finally, looking harried and overworked. For the next couple of hours Loretta was never alone, and I waited, feeling useless, in the outer office again.

After a while, Charley White Hand was taken out in a black body bag, and after another while Loretta, with the two county councilpersons standing stiffly near her — but noticeably not by her side, gave a brief, matter-of-fact statement to the reporter. Then she disappeared into her office again, and after another long while, one of the deputies told me she’d gone home and had asked them to tell me that she just wanted to be alone.

And partly because I respected her wishes, partly because I didn’t know where she lived, but mostly because she was a big girl, I left it.

Which put me on the street at a quarter to twelve without a clue as to how to get home.

But just as I was examining this problem, Mac’s cab pulled up and solved it.

“So,” Mac said tentatively after I’d gotten in and we were headed up the mountain. “They find out who it was?”

I looked at him looking at me in the rear view. “I beg your pardon?”

He waggled his head toward Mount Fear. “That body you found the other day,” he said. “Newspaper this morning said the cops didn’t know who it was.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. They’ve I.D.’d him.”

He drove in silence for a while, which was fine with me, but once we were through the switchbacks on the mountain’s south face, he said, “Paper said he froze to death.”

I nodded. “That’s right.”

He hmmmphed, then gave me a look over his shoulder. “You in ’Nam?” he asked.

“I was there,” I told him.

He nodded. “Khe Sanh, ’68-’69.”

“Saigon,” I told him, not really wanting to talk about it, “ ’69–72.”

He sighed. “Long time ago, eh?”

Not long enough, I thought.

The mountain road was slippery with frozen patches of snow, so he had to slow down. He was quiet most of the way, and I really hoped he didn’t want to talk about the war, but once we were close to the lodges, he said, “Never got over how hot it was, y’know? Like a steambath, sometimes, you remember?”

“It was hot,” I agreed.

He turned onto the road that led up to my cabin and said, “Stupid bugger, probably didn’t know what the cold could do.”

“I’m sorry?”

He pulled to a stop, then turned in his seat. “You know,” he told me. “Walkin’ around in the middle of the night, up on this mountain in the dead of winter.” He shook his head with surprising sadness. “Comin’ from over there, he probably had no experience of such cold before. He sits down for a rest, and before he knows it, he’s asleep — and that’s all she wrote.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

I paid him his fare and got out of the cab.

“Stupid bugger,” he said again.

I was dead tired by the time my head hit the pillow, but sleep was no easier won that night than the night before.

In fact, that night I had the worst nightmares of my life.

Rippling the fabric of my unconscious, bad little memories, tiny nut-hard guilts that harbor mostly quietly in my mind’s dark alleys, careless cruelties half-forgotten that wait like thumbtacks in a pile rug waiting to jab when I didn’t expect it, things I’d done and wished I hadn’t — I don’t know why they picked that night to attack me, but they did and tossed me every which way, and I didn’t get the sleep I needed until nearly dawn.

But then, thank goodness, I did sleep, and it was midafternoon before I woke up.

To a brilliantly bright day — and, for some reason, my head was clear, my mind sharp, and as I started out on my run down the mountain, I felt really good.

Despite some sombre thoughts.

About young Charley White Hand, and his bad, bad choice; and Loretta and the second guessing she was now probably putting herself through; and Tuyet Le and her children and the quietly desperate lives they’d lived so far and had before them; and Long Van Doan.

My snowman.

His own life ended as coldly as it had been lived.

R.I.P.

I jogged past the lookout, feeling strong and good, and around the turn that would take me to the ranger station, a little girl of eight or nine standing in the driveway of a large white house on the mountain side of the highway waved at me as I went by, so I smiled, waved back, and kept moving, thinking I’d better slow down or I’d never have enough for the uphill leg...

When a snowball hit me smack in the back of my head.

Surprised, then amused, I skidded to a stop and looked back at the little girl, who’d been joined by a littler boy and who both stood together in the driveway, semihiding behind a mailbox, giggling.

Their eyes looked wide and excited and a little scared.

I waggled a remonstrating finger at them, then grabbed up some snow, made a ball of my own, and threw a perfect strike at the mailbox, which sent both children laughing up the driveway.

I watched them run, casting half-worried, half-happy looks back at me, then I laughed myself and started to run again.

Down to the ranger station, then back the way I’d come, thinking about the steak I was going to reward myself with that night, thinking of the wine I’d have with it, and thinking about my life and how I was living it — and I came to a few decisions, not the least of which had to do with the new me I’d started to create.

I decided to stay off cigarettes, moderate my meat and liquor intake, and keep running.

Not to be young again but to be everything my age can be, and for the first time in a while, my discontent had less of an edge to it, and I was feeling pretty smug...

When a squad-sized unit of children, aged five to ten — including the little girl and boy who’d assaulted me earlier — rose up from behind bushes and trees on either side of the highway and let me have it from all sides.

It was a short, noisy, happy snowball fight that ended when I caught one on the side of the head and fell spread-eagled and laughing into a drift on the side of the road. I was too exhausted to defend myself any longer, so after I’d taken a few more hits but didn’t return fire, the children got bored with me and ran off, and I stood up, hearing their noise grow fainter, deciding I’d just walk the rest of the way — and feeling, for the first time, glad to be where I was...

When the whole thing exploded in my mind like a starburst.

Which is how it happens sometimes.

I took my time walking back up the hill, giving it a good long think — making sure — and when I got back, I nosed around the Fear Mountain Lodge’s facilities, talking to people, keeping my questions vague because I wanted reaction less than I wanted answers really — but I got lucky with the restaurant manager, confirmed what he told me with a waitress in the bar, and then I was sure.

Which left me with some decision-making to do. I hiked back up to my cabin, thinking through the options, and was halfway there when Dilly’s Trans Am came up behind me and stopped.

I got in and looked at her. “How’re you doing?” I asked.

She looked as though she hadn’t slept. Her face was pinched, her eyes red and puffed. She swallowed and said, “I’m... not letting myself feel what happened. Not now. Not yet.”

I could see that wasn’t true, but I nodded.

“I’m going to resign. I wanted you to know.”

“Loretta...”

“You were right,” she said. “That boy didn’t belong in jail. I don’t know what I was thinking. He was just a kid. Just eighteen...”

“Loretta, will you listen to me?”

“I don’t know why I came down so hard on him,” she went on. “He only took a coat, for God’s sake. Just a coat.” She banged the steering wheel with a fist.

I grabbed her hand and held it.

“I should have put a close watch on him,” she went on. “I should have known.”

“Loretta!”

She stared at me.

I stared back at her for a moment, thinking up words to say; then I dropped her hand and nodded toward the road. “Drive me to my cabin,” I told her.

Once we were there, I took her inside, put her in a chair in the front room, gave her a long, “I-don’t-why-I’m-telling-this-to-you” look, then said:

“About ten years ago, I was stationed at Fort Ord.”

She frowned up at me.

I sighed. “I was doing background followups on ROTC grads who’d just gotten their commissions. I turned up some dirt on this kid, a twenty-three-year-old accounting major. He’d had a sexual encounter with another boy about a year before.”

Loretta kept her frown in place.

I put a small smile on my face. “So, naturally, I talked to him about it. Told him what I knew — and he was scared. He admitted what I’d found out but told me he was straight. He said he’d gotten drunk on the night in question, and he barely remembered what happened.” I laughed shortly and shook my head. “He told me he had a girlfriend, and I could ask her if he was straight or not. He pleaded with me not to jerk his clearance, that he wanted to stay in the ROTC, and get his M.B.A. Said he’d wanted to be an army officer all his life.”

Loretta sighed. “I don’t see what this has to do with...”

“His name was Springer,” I told her, in a haunted way. “David Springer.”

I walked over to the window and looked out over the sun-bright mountainside, where, not very far away, a man and woman on skis were sidestepping along a gentle slope.

I said, “I not only jerked his clearance, but I recommended a BCD for his failure to disclose his homosexuality.”

The woman fell suddenly, and the man laughed, then fell himself.

“A week later, he put a .45 slug into his brain.”

Behind me Loretta made a short sympathetic groan.

“A long time ago,” I told her. She nodded.

“But, hell, Loretta, that’s not even the worst thing I’ve ever done, but the point is, I didn’t quit. I found a way to live with what I’d done and carried on.”

She made a face that reflected doubt.

“And that’s what you have to do,” I told her. “You didn’t kill Charley White Hand. He did it — and there was no way for you to know what was in his mind. He made his own choice, and now he’s dead.” I went over to her and squeezed her shoulder. “But you’re alive, and only the living matter, Loretta.”

She shook her head.

“And you can feel bad about it,” I went on. “You should feel bad about it, but don’t let it kill you, and don’t take yourself out of a position where you can make a difference the next time.”

She laughed without humor. “And what happens the next time?”

“Next time?” I smiled and shrugged. “Next time you’ll do better.”

She shook her head again, with doubt still on her face, but the look of fatalistic determination was gone.

I changed the subject.

I flopped down on the sofa opposite and said, “Autopsy done on Doan?”

“No marks on the body,” she told me. “No trauma. No apparent illness. No toxins in him, either. Nothing wrong with him at all, except being frozen to death.”

I nodded. “Suicide, then?”

She heard something in my voice that made her cock her head at me slightly. “Do you think different?” she asked.

“No,” I told her truthfully.

She gave me a long thoughtful look. “Well...”

“You look beat,” I said.

“I haven’t slept in I don’t know how long.”

“You can crash here if you like.”

She gave me a tired, what-does-that-mean look, and I gave her a take-it-or-leave-it shrug right back, and after a moment she smiled and sagged back on her chair.

“Tell you what,” I said, getting to my feet. “You catch some sleep while I do some shopping, and when you get up, I’ll make you a Spanish omelette that will be a poem.” I grabbed her hands and pulled her up. “Deal?” I asked, with my face an inch from hers.

She agreed in a manner that suited us both.

Later, with Loretta asleep in my bed, I sat drinking coffee — instant, but real — in front of the fire I’d built in the fireplace, and finished the decision-making process I’d started earlier.

Deciding among other things that although a prudent man indeed takes Nietzsche in small doses, when he was right, he was right.

“Like every good thing on earth,” he’d written, “justice ends by suspending itself. The fine name this self-cancelling justice has given itself is mercy. But mercy remains, as goes without saying, the prerogative of the strongest, his province beyond the law.”

Which, if knowledge was power, and power characteristic of the strongest, made mercy my prerogative.

At least for the moment.

At dusk, I walked down the highway and found Mac lounging against his cab in his usual place in front of the restaurant. After I’d climbed inside and after he’d gotten in behind the wheel and asked me where to, I said, “Just down the road a ways, Mac. There’s something I want to check out.”

He took me down the hill, and I directed him to the lookout where I’d first come across the corpse on the bench.

The sun had set by then, and after he stopped the cab, I got out and looked at the lights in the houses, plainly visible through the pines that covered the face of the mountain.

I waved at Mac, who was still sitting in his cab with the motor running, and said, “Could you step out here a minute, Mac?”

He hesitated for a second or two, then killed the engine and got out, coming over to stand where I stood near the railing.

“It’s like I figured,” I told him.

He frowned at me.

“He might have been lost, but he could have gotten help at one of those cabins. You can see the lights easily enough.”

I pointed out the obvious, and Mac looked at the house lights, then back at me.

“The only real danger he was in was the danger he was to himself.” I nodded toward the bench. “He killed himself, Mac. He just sat down here and gave life up.”

“Oh,” he said, as if just getting what I was driving at.

“Vietnamese,” I said. “We made life hell for them in their own country, then we made it hell for them here.” I took a deep breath and looked out over the railing at the darkening sky. “You married, Mac?”

“No.”

“Ever been?”

“No.”

“He was,” I said.

Mac started to say something but changed his mind.

“The way I see it,” I told him, “you got him up here in his own cab, made him get out, and you left him. You drove his cab down the mountain and ditched it.”

Mac was quiet.

“I don’t think you intended to kill him. I figure you thought you were just teaching him a lesson in turf protection.”

I turned back to him and saw him staring at me wide-eyed.

“The thing is, Mac, he’d been taught that lesson before. More than once. Texas. San Diego. San Francisco. Everybody protected their turf, and there was no place for him.” I waved my hand at the world immediately around us. “He’d just run out of places to go.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mac whispered.

I smiled and said, “I’m not the police, Mac. You don’t have to say anything to me. This is just — soldier to soldier.”

He snorted, then frowned a brave look of disparaging disbelief.

I smiled again. “But if I did have a talk with the sheriff — who is a close personal friend of mine, by the way — and I told her that you knew that the body I found was of a Vietnamese before that bit of information got in the newspaper, she might want to ask you a few questions.

“And,” I went on easily, “if I told her that the manager of Fear Mountain Lodges had seen you threaten Long Van Doan about driving his cab on your mountain, I imagine she’d have a few questions to ask him.”

He swallowed and began breathing a little roughly.

“And the sheriff,” I continued, “being a good cop and a very smart woman, would probably ask around, fixing your whereabouts Tuesday night, and before too long she’d put two and two together — and you’d find yourself in kind of a tight spot.”

His mouth sagged open.

“Trying to explain to a jury how you only meant to scare the man.”

He looked away from me, down at his shoes.

I scooped some snow from the ground and said, “Now, I don’t know if they could make a murder case out of this, Mac, but I’m damn sure they’ll get you on something.”

He said nothing.

“And you’ll do some time,” I told him.

He heaved a big raggedy sigh but kept his head down.

“And you’ll never be the same after that,” I added.

He looked up at me with a what-now look on his face.

I worked the snow I held into a tight white ball. “On top of which you will never get a liquor license with a felony conviction in this state, which ends the idea of Mac’s Tavern.”

His swallowed and looked a little sick.

“You following me, Mac?”

He said nothing, but he was.

I turned and threw the snowball I was holding, watched it strike the top of a tall pine tree down in the valley below, and saw the tree explode with snow. “The thing is, I’ve got no big desire to see you behind bars, Mac.”

He cocked his head slightly.

“I mean, what’s the point?”

He frowned, suddenly very interested.

“Doan is dead, Mac, and only the living matter.” I shrugged. “Prison seems a waste in this case, don’t you think?”

He half nodded, half started to say something, but I stopped him by putting a finger on his chest and telling him, “But you’ve got to make it right.”

He swallowed and stared.

“I mean — justice has to come into this business at some point,” I told him reasonably. “You can’t get away with this.

“You know that,” I said.

He didn’t say so, but he knew.

“He left a wife and five kids, Mac. He was their sole support.” I waited a moment until his eyes met mine. “Now you’re their sole support.”

He blinked.

“That’s simple enough, isn’t it?” I asked. “You just step into his shoes. Assume his responsibilities.” I smiled. “Like a blood stripe.”

He said nothing, his eyes drifting away from me.

“So?” I said.

He looked back at me.

“Are we connecting here, or what?”

We were.

So, we talked a bit more — negotiated, I suppose — and came to terms and conditions we could both live with — at least I could, and I hoped he would — and when we were done, I had him drive me into town for groceries, then back up to the lodge.

Back in my cabin an hour later, with Loretta still sound asleep, I started the breakfast I’d promised her. By then it was nearly eight and I decided to make the call then. It was Friday and he might be away for the weekend, and I wanted the ball rolling as soon as possible. After the phone rang twice a boy — eight or nine, using the voice-deepened tones of a boy ten or eleven — answered, saying, “Springer residence.”

I asked to speak with his father, who came on the line directly, and I told him who I was, adding, “How’re you doing, David?”

“Couldn’t be better,” he told me. “How about yourself?”

“Same as always,” I told him. “Marie and the kids?”

“Fine,” he replied in a mildly curious way, and we chatted a bit more about nothing in particular until I got to the point, saying, “Um, David — are you still with First Western?”

“Senior VP,” he told me.

“And how’s the commercial savings and loan business?” I asked.

“Middling,” he replied. “Why?”

“Well,” I told him, “the fact is, David, your name came up today in connection with this little money problem I have.”

“How much do you need?” he asked in a say-no-more way.

I laughed. “No. I don’t need a loan...”

“However much it is,” he said quickly, “I’ll work it out. You know I owe you...”

“This isn’t about me, David,” I told him. “It’s about this woman and her children. She’s recently widowed, and she’ll be coming into some money in a few days. A lump sum payment of seventy-five thousand dollars and a monthly amount as well. The donor wishes to remain anonymous.”

“I see,” he said, in an I-don’t-see-at-all-but-whatever-you-say-is-fine-with-me way.

“The woman will need help,” I went on, “managing things. She has some relatives down there in San Diego, but she’s Vietnamese and speaks no English. She’s expressed interest in opening a restaurant.”

He laughed. “Just what San Diego needs — another Vietnamese restaurant.”

I laughed back at him, then said, “Can you help?”

He sighed. “No problem,” he told me.

“I can have the donor contact you, then?”

“Certainly.”

“Great. I really appreciate this, David.”

“My pleasure.”

“And,” I added lightly, “you can call us even.”

“No,” he told me flatly, after a slight hesitation. “No, I can’t.”