Everybody's Fool

Sock Drawer

“WHAT DO YOU mean no snake?” she wanted to know.

Raymer, groggy, was sitting in the middle of his office sofa, his hands tented over his boxers. He’d worn briefs his whole life until he disrobed in front of Becka that first time and she’d reacted to them with startled revulsion. “Well,” she said, “that’s going to have to change.” Apparently, it was an iron-clad policy: she dated only men who wore boxers. His sleeveless undershirts had to go as well. He hadn’t really minded switching to boxers, though they took some getting used to, given how they bunched up and gapped at the fly, which was why he’d tented his hands over them now. What did it mean that he hadn’t gone back to briefs now that Becka was gone? The sad truth was that during their short tenure together he’d learned to defer to Becka in most matters. She’d switched him from Colgate to Crest, from Listerine to Scope, from Arrid to Right Guard. Free now to return to his own preferences, he discovered that they’d come to match. Maybe that was what marriage meant, except that in theirs it had been a one-way street. He couldn’t think of a single behavior of Becka’s that he had altered in the slightest. But perhaps that was because there was so little he’d wanted to change, whereas she’d evidently viewed him as a fixer-upper from the start, structurally sound, the sort of property you wouldn’t mind owning after you’d completed all the necessary renovations. First, though, you’d have to gut it, which was pretty much how Raymer felt by the end. As if the overhaul of his person was coming in over budget, and the person footing the bills was having serious second thoughts.

To judge by her expression, the woman standing over him in her off-duty attire — tight jeans and a halter top, in all rather provocative — agreed. It was as if by studying him she could envision all the improvements Becka had tried to make and was calculating how much work remained to be done, what it would cost to finish a job so poorly begun or whether it would make better sense to start over and just gut him again. How was it possible that two women with so little in common had come to share such an unflattering assessment?

“I mean,” he told Charice, his embarrassment giving way to annoyance, “no…fucking…snake.”

He and Justin had gone through every apartment in the Morrison Arms, including Raymer’s, plus the common areas. No snake, no trace. Tomorrow, when electricity was restored, it would have to be done again, this time, blessedly, without Raymer’s assistance. Justin had called in additional animal-control personnel from Albany, but even so he wasn’t very hopeful. It was possible the cobra had slithered into a vent or behind a wall, though it wasn’t likely. Thanks to the heat wave, all the windows that didn’t have air conditioners in them had been flung open in hopes of capturing a stray breeze, and the two rear doors on opposite ends of the central corridor had been propped open as well. The snake was long gone, probably into the weedy lot out back. Once it was daylight it, too, would have to be searched. Until then there wasn’t much to be done. The Squeers brothers and the town’s two or three other private trash collectors had already been warned to be careful when upending garbage cans into their trucks. Meanwhile, until the authorities were certain there was no danger, the Arms was off-limits to residents, all of whom had been given vouchers for a night’s stay at one of the inexpensive motels out by the interstate, a significant upgrade as far as they were concerned.

Raymer himself had a voucher but for the time being had opted for his office sofa. Not wanting anyone to know he was there, he’d snuck into the station through the back door. Dead on his feet, he’d had just enough energy left to shed his sweat-soaked uniform before collapsing onto the couch, too exhausted to go over and make sure the door was locked. So Charice had found him there, enjoying a sleep so profound and dreamless that it bordered on oblivion, the kind of slumber only a very cruel person would interrupt. In fact, the kind of person who, if she was to be believed, had a butterfly tattooed on her rear end.

“What are you even doing here?” he asked.

“I work here, same as you. What’re you saying, exactly? It got away, or there was no snake to begin with?”

The former, he assured her, though the question was understandable. Mass hysteria had been Raymer’s own first thought. Somebody yells Snake! and everybody sees scores of them all over. But that was before he and Justin entered apartment 107. It hadn’t taken Justin long to suss out what was going on in there. No pots, pans, plates, bowls or silverware in the kitchen. Just a ratty couch facing the small television in the living room. A minifridge stocked with cheap beer under the window. The larger kitchen fridge, with most of its shelving removed, had been completely repurposed. Justin had noted the temperature setting and removed the one flat box, holding it out to Raymer and saying, “Snake?” When the shape of the box altered subtly before Raymer’s eyes and he took a quick, involuntary step backward, Justin grinned and returned it to the fridge. “No doubt about it, this guy’s in business.”

The guy being “William Smith,” according to Boogie Waggengneckt, who’d never met him and claimed to have learned only the day before what was in the UPS packages he’d been signing for. Nobody else at the Arms seemed to have met the guy, either.

The bedroom in 107 was heavily curtained, so dark inside that Raymer instinctively flipped the switch, which of course did nothing at all. There was just enough light from the front room for them to make out the cages stacked on the bed and along one wall. When Justin turned on his flashlight, there was a chorus of rattles and hisses, but it was the dark, relentless, ropy movement that caused Raymer to back into the front room, his stomach roiling with rancid Twelve Horse ale. When Justin emerged a few minutes later, carefully shutting the door behind him, he was carrying a blue plastic pail of the sort you’d take to the beach for a small child. This one was full of handguns. “Not just the snake business, either,” Justin said, handing them to Raymer, who examined several of them. The serial numbers, no surprise, had all been filed off. “You’ll find drugs as well, I can almost guarantee it.”

It had taken them and two additional officers, together with the apartment house’s manager, three nerve-racking hours to complete the search for the missing snake, after which Raymer had ordered the Arms locked down and the entire complex to be surrounded with crime-scene tape.

“Did I hear you right?” Justin asked him when they were back outside in the parking lot. Justin was still in his waders, leaning against his van and smoking a cigarette. “You live here?”

Raymer, deeply embarrassed, winced. “I had no idea.” What one of his neighbors was up to, he meant, though it was possible Justin had merely been commenting on the fact that the place was a sty and not the sort of place a police chief would call home.

“Well, you wouldn’t, necessarily. These guys don’t linger. They set up shop, do their business and get the fuck out of Dodge. Three, four weeks, max.”

“You’ve run into this before?”

“Heard about it. Mostly down south.”

“Why an apartment house instead of someplace out in the sticks?”

“You’d have to ask them, but cost is a factor, I imagine. Plus rural folks tend to be nosy. Observant. Welfare types mind their own damn business. They got too many problems of their own to worry about the neighbors. If it hadn’t been for the power outage, you probably never would’ve known this guy was even here.”

“Explain the fridge, then? And the air-conditioning?”

“Below sixty degrees, snakes basically hibernate. With the AC running, they’d wake up every couple of days, drink some water, go back to sleep. You wouldn’t even need to feed them.”

“Whereas in ninety-five-degree heat?”

“Wide awake. Hungry. Pissed off.”

None of it made any sense to Raymer. “Okay, but why?”

“There’s a growing market for exotic reptiles. Boas don’t make bad pets, actually. Gotta remember to feed ’em, though. One lady down in Florida drove to the market for milk. Gone, like, ten minutes. Came home to this very fat snake in the baby’s crib.”

Raymer considered sharing this story with Charice now. Maybe she’d go away and leave him alone.

“So what you’re saying is, it got away?” she wanted to know, still obsessed by the cobra. “Got away where? What if it bites some little kid?”

“The kid dies.”

“That’s cold.”

“We searched until it was pitch dark, okay? What do you want from me?” He intended this to be a rhetorical question, but he could tell she didn’t get it. “Please? Pretty please? Could we continue this conversation after I get dressed?” He pointed at his office chair, over which he’d draped his pants. “If you won’t go away, could you at least hand me those?”

She did, reluctantly, making forceps of her thumb and index finger. Could you blame her? The waistband was still soggy with perspiration. He’d have to drop the whole uniform off at the dry cleaners.

“We should be doing something, is all I’m saying,” Charice told him, backing off a little. “Serve and protect, right?”

“I wish we’d settled on that instead of We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”

“There you go putting in that extra ‘not’ again.”

Rising, he turned his back to her, pulled on his trousers and immediately felt better, as only a man who’d never felt comfortable in his God-given body will. “Volunteers are going door-to-door in the neighborhood,” he assured her, “warning people not to let their children play outside until it’s found.”

“What if they don’t find it?”

“According to Justin, it’ll probably just slither off into the woods and die of starvation. Or cross the road and get run over by a car.”

“Probably, huh?”

“Or freeze to death when the weather gets cold.”

“It’s the beginning of summer. We’re in a heat wave.”

Bending over to tie his shoes, Raymer suddenly felt dizzy, and when he straightened up the room started spinning. He had to grab the corner of the desk to keep from keeling over.

“Chief?” Charice said, her voice sounding very far off.

“I’m okay,” he said, blinking her back into focus, his equilibrium slowly returning. “Just a little woozy.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

Good question. He’d skipped breakfast and had had no appetite after what’d happened at Hilldale. “Yesterday?”

“No wonder,” she said. “Okay, then. You’re coming home with me.”

“Umm…”

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that mean, ‘umm’?”

“I mean, there’s a department rule against fraternizing.”

“Don’t worry, slick. I got my own rules about that. What we’re talkin’ about is food, not funny business. My damn fool brother was supposed to come over, but he’s too upset over his baby got scratched. So I got a whole fridge full of food and nobody to help me eat it.”

“Really?” Though still faint, he was hungry.

“Fried chicken. Collard greens. Black-eyed peas. Grits. Watermelon for dessert.”

“We’ll have to stop by the Arms so I can change.”

“Hold on a minute,” she said. “You believed me just now?”

“Umm.” He felt himself flush darkly. By not picking up on her joke, he’d managed to insult her. “I’m sorry, Charice. I’ve lived right here in Bath my whole life. When it comes to black people, I know you and Jerome. And Mr. Hynes,” he added, remembering the old man.

“And you think Jerome would eat a single collard green?”

“I don’t know. I just wish…”

She waited.

He swallowed hard, aware that whatever he said next would probably be a mistake, yet another opportunity for his favorite cocktail: two parts humiliation, one part bitter regret, blend until smooth. Drink up. After all, it had been that kind of day. About as bad as any he could remember since the one when Becka came downstairs like a Slinky. He felt his eyes fill with tears. “I wish,” he stumbled, thinking as much about his dead wife as the woman he was now speaking to, “that where women are concerned I didn’t feel like a complete fool every minute of my life.”

He half expected Charice to tell him, as Becka surely would have, that the solution to that problem was simple: stop behaving like one. Instead, she just held his gaze for a long moment and said, “Lamb chops. Jerome’s favorite. And salad. You like lamb chops?”

“I do.”

“You know how to light a fire?”

“If you mean charcoal, sure.”

“Chief?” she said. “Could I say something?”

“Have I ever prevented you from speaking your mind?”

“This is kind of personal.”

“It’s all been kind of personal, Charice.”

“You gotta stop worrying so much about being wrong.”

This was true, of course. He’d known that much for a very long time. Back when he was a boy, he’d imagined the remedy was to stop being wrong. Being right would lead to the kind of self-confidence that other people seemed to achieve so effortlessly. The better solution, according to his mother, was to quit caring so much. But how? Neither she nor anybody else had been able to help him with that part.

“I mean, being wrong isn’t such a big deal,” Charice was saying. “We’re all wrong about a hundred times a day.”

“I’m wrong a hundred times before breakfast.”

“For instance, I’ve been wrong about you from the start.” Then, when he didn’t respond, she said, “Aren’t you going to ask how?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you even listening to me?”

No, he hadn’t been. Not really. He’d been listening to himself. Trapped, as usual, in the maze of Douglas Raymer’s thoughts, with no exit. He scrolled back.

“How were you wrong about me, Charice?”

“Now I don’t know if I should even tell you.”

“But you’re going to. We both know that. You’ve never not told me something you wanted me to know.”

“That’s true, but I could tell you tomorrow instead of now.” Her hand was on the door and she was smiling again, even more broadly this time.

“Tell me, Charice. I’m sure it’s something I need to know.”

She lowered her gaze to belt level. “Those shorts. Something very wrong there. I never would’ve pegged you for a boxers man.”

—

HER AGED CIVIC wasn’t spacious, but at least the passenger seat had been pushed back as far as it would go. Until now, Raymer hadn’t given much thought to Charice’s private life, though it was suggestive, surely, that the seat’s default mode had apparently been determined by her long-legged brother and not some boyfriend. And Friday nights, when another young woman might have been going out on a date or drinking happy-hour margaritas with girlfriends, she’d been planning on cooking dinner for Jerome. It stood to reason, he supposed. It couldn’t be easy for a young black woman here. Who would she go out with in conservative, lily-white Bath? Her brother — tall, handsome, well dressed and well spoken — wouldn’t lack for social opportunity in Schuyler Springs. A college town, its demographic downstate, liberal, hip, urban. Charice might’ve had an easier time of it over there, though Raymer doubted it. White men, at least in his experience, might be attracted to a good-looking black woman but were much less likely to date her than a black man was to date a white woman. Would Raymer himself have asked Charice out if he hadn’t been married when they met, and if he hadn’t been her boss, and if she wasn’t always busting his balls and threatening to sue him for job-related offenses? Okay, that was too many “ifs” to work through with any confidence. He had been married and he was her boss and she did bust his balls morning, noon and night, and most of the time she seemed at least half serious about suing him.

And anyway, maybe this was all a crock. What did he really know about her? She lived in Bath, but maybe she partied in Schuyler. Maybe she had a date every night. Maybe half the eligible men in town had seen her butterfly tattoo. What did it say about him that he assumed she had no social life? That supper at home with her brother on Friday nights was something she looked forward to, the high point of her week? Did the fact that she’d invited her middle-aged, depressed honky boss over to eat Jerome’s lamb chops suggest that despondency had set in? Possibly. But wasn’t it also possible that, while he was busy pitying her, she was already pitying him? If he wasn’t careful, he’d find out.

“There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment,” she said when they pulled into the empty parking lot at the Morrison Arms. Except for a single streetlight farther up the block and Gert’s, which must’ve had a backup generator, the street was pitch black. On a normal Friday night, that dive would’ve been packed, its raucous crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk, but not tonight. Further testimony, apparently, to just how much power an escaped cobra could bring to bear on the collective human imagination.

Opening the Honda’s glove box, Raymer couldn’t help smiling at the contrast between Charice’s reassuring clutter and her brother’s obsessive neatness. “Did you know Jerome actually special ordered an owner’s manual to his thirty-five-year-old car?”

Charice sighed and said, “Poor Jerome,” her voice rich with what sounded like genuine pity, though Raymer couldn’t quite gauge its extent. Did she pity her brother generally, because he was Jerome, or just today, undone as he was by the attack on his pride and joy.

“What’s wrong with him, anyway?”

“Wrong?” Suspicious now. Protective, too. He reminded himself that they were twins.

“Why would he think I’d key his car? Can you explain that to me?”

“I could try,” she said, “but the only real explanation for Jerome is Jerome. Don’t be long,” she added when he got out.

He didn’t blame her for being nervous. In broad daylight this parking lot was no place for a woman alone. Tonight, the lot empty, the two-story building encircled by police tape, a lethal serpent slithering somewhere in the vicinity, was enough to give anybody the willies. Aware that Charice was watching him, he did his best to imitate nonchalance as he ducked under the yellow tape and entered the building. In the black stairwell that led up to his second-floor apartment, he shivered despite the still-oppressive heat. Though every apartment here had been carefully searched only hours ago, the fact that they hadn’t found it didn’t mean the snake wasn’t in here somewhere. Or so it seemed just then. Sweeping the flashlight’s beam over the stairs, he nevertheless paused every few steps to listen for hissing. In the dark his other senses were magnified, including, unfortunately, his sense of smell. Who, he asked himself, would urinate in an unventilated stairwell in the middle of a heat wave?

Unlocking his apartment, he pushed the door open slowly, directing the flashlight beam along the perimeter of the floor, looking for movement, half surprised when there wasn’t any. The Arms had a serious roach problem, and despite Raymer’s repeated, aggressive spraying of his apartment’s every recess, the silverfish, centipedes and assorted creepy-crawlies that lived in them all continued to thrive and multiply. When he got up to pee in the middle of the night, the bathroom light sent them scurrying into drains and behind cracked tiles. Normally enough to make your skin crawl, this actually would’ve been welcome now, a signal that the status quo, while disgusting, was still in force. Did exotic reptiles eat cockroaches, he wondered. Had the cobra managed to accomplish in a matter of hours what his dogged spraying had not? This put him in mind of Justin’s story — almost certainly apocryphal — of the woman who came home to find a suspiciously fat boa constrictor in her baby’s crib. Would Raymer find the cobra curled up in the middle of his bed, too cockroach engorged to rear up and hood? From the bedroom doorway, he shined the flashlight first on the bed, then the floor. Both snakeless.

Entering cautiously, he paused before his dresser, the top drawer of which contained his underwear. Amazing, he thought, just how easily a man’s reason could be stampeded. Because, really, the snake had to be long gone, right? Assuming some motorist hadn’t run over it, the thing could have made it all the way to Schuyler Springs by now, though bad news seldom seemed to head in that direction. One of the few places it simply couldn’t be was in a closed sock drawer. For a snake to scale the dresser, pull open the drawer in question without benefit of an opposable thumb (or hand, for that matter), climb in and then — this was the best part — pull the drawer closed again from the inside without the aid of a handle was beyond impossible in the world Raymer knew and navigated on a daily basis. So why did it seem to him at this particular moment that it in fact had managed this feat? And why, before opening the drawer to find out, did he feel the need to rap it smartly with the flashlight and listen for stirring inside? Because he knew from personal experience that the world was rational until it wasn’t, after which all bets were off. When, without warning, the world pivoted, it became in that instant unrecognizable. There you are, cruising along, confident in your knowledge of how things work, until one afternoon you come home early and there’s your beloved wife on the stairs, her forehead seemingly stapled to the bottom step, the whole of her defying gravity. Suddenly you understand how wrong you’ve been about every last fucking thing, and that you have little choice but to adjust to this terrible new reality. What can’t be undeniably is and will be forevermore. Except here, too, you’re wrong. Because gradually, after the shock wears off, the world returns to its familiar old habits, seemingly satisfied to have thrown you for a giant loop and content to await the return of your complacence so it can slip a venomous snake into your damn sock drawer, thereby demonstrating yet again that it, not you, is in charge and always will be, you dumb fuck.

Which was why Raymer, normally calm and rational, slowly inched open the drawer that couldn’t possibly contain a snake and yet might anyway. When nothing stirred or struck, he opened it a little more and then a little more still, leaning back in order to make the cobra’s strike more geometrically challenging, until he could be certain of its contents: undershorts, socks and handkerchiefs. Not even a garter.

Disrobing quickly and kicking his sweaty uniform into the corner (wary of disturbing whatever might be in the hamper), he thought about showering in the dark, then immediately thought better of it. He pulled on a fresh pair of boxers — smiling to think that Charice had correctly intuited his preference for briefs, pleased that a woman her age had given this even a passing thought — and then clean socks, jeans and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt. To avoid having to return later tonight or tomorrow morning, he decided to pack a small bag. That involved getting down on his hands and knees and shining the flashlight under the bed where he kept his gym bag. This he pulled out and shook — for consistency’s sake, because, well, a snake that could access his sock drawer would have no problem unzipping a bag, crawling inside and rezipping it. Into the empty bag he tossed two sets of underclothes and three extra shirts, since he was already sweating through the one he’d just put on.

Passing by the window, he glanced down into the parking lot, empty except for Charice’s Civic, just as its dome light came on and she got out. She was either too hot sitting there or growing impatient with how long he was taking. Something about her posture, how anxiously she surveyed the dark building, suggested a third, albeit remote, possibility: that she was concerned for his well-being. Was it conceivable that what her batshit brother had said that afternoon was true — that Charice was devoted to him? He doubted it. Just as he didn’t believe that Becka had ever once worried about him. At the Academy, all the cadets had been warned about the emotional toll police work can take on marriages. Awakening to sirens at three in the morning, spouses would wonder if tonight was the night they’d get the call they’d been dreading. Your husband’s been shot. He’s in intensive care, stable for now, but you’d better come right away. Of course such nightmare scenarios were mostly urban, and Raymer was unlikely to get shot in Bath. On the other hand, until today the odds of his being bitten by a cobra had seemed considerably long as well. The world was a dangerous place, and Becka must’ve known that on any given day her husband might pull over the wrong car or stop at a convenience store just as some wacked-out dickhead emerged with the contents of the register in his jacket pocket, a Slurpee in one hand and a.45 in the other. Raymer had been prepared to reassure Becka that nothing like that would ever happen to him, but somewhat disappointingly the subject had never come up.

From where he stood now it was too dark and Charice was too far away for him to see the expression on her face, but it was flattering to imagine that it might reveal something other than her usual profound irritation. When she appeared to look in his general direction, he waved, but as he did she looked away again, and he doubted he’d have been visible in an unlit window anyway.

In the bathroom he added his shaving kit to the gym bag, then returned to the front room and paused for a moment, trying to think if there was anything else he’d need at the motel that evening. Strange that it should come home to him so powerfully — with the apartment’s squalor far less obvious in the dark — that Charice was right about the Morrison Arms. That he resided by choice in such a shithole spoke volumes about his state of mind, if not his character. Things hadn’t been right, or even close to right, since Becka. Most days he was borderline deranged with something he didn’t identify as either grief or jealousy but that might be a strange hybrid of the two. But did it really matter what was wrong with him? The important thing was that the time had come to pull himself together. Probably losing that garage-door remote this morning was the best thing that could’ve happened to him. He could see that now. Just let it go. The suspicion, the jealousy, the self-doubt. All of it.

He was thinking he’d do exactly that when he opened his apartment door and ran smack into the backlit man on the other side of it, his fist raised, mid-knock. The sound that emerged from Raymer’s larynx resembled a bleat as he staggered backward, his heart in his throat, his chest leaping violently. Only when his flashlight hit the floor and skittered away, coming to rest between the dark figure’s feet, did he realize he’d dropped it.

“Mr. Hynes,” he said when that gentleman bent down, his ancient bones creaking, retrieved the flashlight and handed it back to him. “What’re you doing here?”

“Thought I heard somebody,” he said. “You still looking for that reptile?”

“No,” Raymer said, his hand over his heart, which was still thumping wildly. “It’s probably halfway back to India by now.”

“Thought you was a burglar,” the old man said. “Sneaking around here in the dark like that…”

“Yeah, but Mr. Hynes?”

“Uh-huh?”

“If I was a burglar, what was your plan?”

“Get a good look at you,” he said. “ ’Dentify you in the police lineup. Send yo’ ass to jail.”

“But…,” Raymer started, then decided against trying to talk him out of good citizenship. “Mr. Hynes? You’re not supposed to be here. That’s what the yellow tape around the building means. Until we remove that, the building isn’t safe. Especially for a man of your years, all alone in the dark. What if you fell and there was nobody around to hear you call for help?”

“Me and the dark is old friends,” he said. “Go way back. Before you was born, even.”

“Didn’t they give you a coupon, Mr. Hynes? So you could stay out at the Holiday Inn tonight? Have dinner at Applebee’s? Paid for by the town of Bath?”

“How my gonna get my ass out yonder?”

“I can get somebody to give you a lift,” Raymer assured him. “Hell, I’ll take you out there right now.” Charice wouldn’t mind a short detour.

The old man shook his head. “Too late. Already had my dinner. Old people got poor digestion. Eat early. Pass my bedtime, too.”

Raymer sighed. “Mr. Hynes?”

“Uh-huh?”

“You like doing things your own way, don’t you?”

“Eighty-some-odd years I been at it.”

“If I let you stay here, are you gonna tell on me? If that snake crawls into your bed and bites you, are you gonna throw me under the bus? Tell people I said you could stay?”

“Snake’s halfway back to India by now,” said Mr. Hynes. “You said so your own self.”

“That’s true, I did, but I’m wrong about a lot. When I say the snake’s gone, I mean probably. I mean it’s gone unless it isn’t. If I’m wrong, it’s you that gets bit, not me. So why don’t you let me give you a ride out to the Holiday Inn? It’d make me feel a whole lot better.”

“Thank you. I ’preciate it, but I’ll take my chances. You can come check up on me in the mornin’. See if I’m dead or alive. If I’m dead, you can say I toad you so.”

To Raymer that sounded like the last word, so he pulled the apartment door shut behind him, and together they started down the stairs, Mr. Hynes clutching the railing with one hand and Raymer’s elbow with the other, his fingers like talons, his grip fierce. “Somebody been peeing in here,” he observed, sniffing the air. “White man.”

“You can tell?”

“Yup. A whitey for sure.”

“How?”

“ ’Cause the only black person livin’ here is me, and I use my own facility.”

Odd, Raymer thought as they descended, how the human touch could serve to banish fear. In the company of this frail old man, there was suddenly no reason to fear some cobra. Outside, a horn tooted. At the bottom of the stairs, Raymer said, “You sure you’re going to be okay here?”

“Be fine. Goin’ to bed. That a black gal I see you with out there?”

So he’d watched them pull in, then. Saw Charice under the Honda’s dome light when he got out of the car. He hadn’t climbed the stairs because he thought Raymer was a burglar. No, he was curious, just as he’d been about Jerome that afternoon. “You don’t miss much, Mr. Hynes.”

“Wish I was younger,” he said. “Give you a run for your money.”

“You’ve got the wrong idea. She works for me,” he explained. “Plus I’m ten years older than she is. More.”

“So what?”

“Also, she could do a lot better,” he added, thinking again of Becka, who’d evidently come to that same conclusion.

“So what?” the old man repeated. “Every woman I been lucky with coulda done better than me. When it comes to men, gals ain’t always thinkin’ straight. A man do well to remain alert to the possibility.”

“She doesn’t even like me, Mr. Hynes. She’s keeping a list of all the things I do wrong so she can sue me later.”

“Could be love.”

“I don’t think so.”

The man shrugged. “Pass my bedtime,” he repeated.

“I’ll have somebody come by and check on you in the morning,” Raymer promised.

“Have her do it. Maybe she got a thing for old men. You never know,” he cackled, waving goodbye. “Get me a good night’s sleep, just in case.”

Raymer watched as Mr. Hynes shuffled down the dark corridor, one hand along the wall to steady himself. He tried to imagine his days, sitting outside in a lawn chair, hour upon hour, waving a little American flag at passersby. He recalled what Jerome had said earlier at Gert’s — that taking the time to talk to a lonely old man really was what police work was all about. He would’ve liked to believe Jerome was right, though a better policeman wouldn’t have allowed Mr. Hynes to remain at the Morrison Arms tonight. He’d have ignored his preference and made the man safe.

“I was about to go in there after you,” Charice said when he emerged from the building. “What took you so long?”

“I packed a bag,” he said, holding it up.

When they got into the car, she left her door open so the dome light stayed on and arched an eyebrow at him. “You think you’re stayin’ over? You think lamb chops is just the first course?”

“God no, Charice,” he said, feeling himself flush.

Her eyebrow elevated even farther now. “What do you mean, ‘God no’? Like you wouldn’t think of staying, even if you got invited? Is that what ‘God no’ means?”

“No, Charice,” he said. “All I meant was…”

She was grinning at him now, which meant she’d been toying with him again, as with the fake menu of fried chicken and collard greens.

“I just wish you wouldn’t be so mean to me,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I wish I wouldn’t, too. I just can’t help myself, I guess.”

“Please try.”

“I know one thing,” she said, turning the key in the ignition and closing the door. “Next time I’m coming in with you. No more sitting out in the parking lot, wondering if you’re lying snakebit on the floor in there.”

He looked over at her, but with the light out it was impossible to read her expression. It would have been nice to believe that maybe this was the beginning of a friendship, but how could you be friends with a woman if you never knew when she was making fun of you? At least with Becka, he told himself, then stopped. Had he completed the thought, it would’ve been: he’d known where he stood. But that wasn’t true. He hadn’t known where he stood with Becka. He’d just imagined he did.

“There might not be a next time,” he told Charice, something like an intention forming in the part of his skull where his headache had been earlier. Until that moment he hadn’t even been aware that it was gone. “I’m thinking about moving.”

On, he thought. He was thinking about moving on.