Everybody's Fool

Suppositories

“YOU FAINTED into the grave?”

Charice’s voice crackled with a mixture of radio static and disbelief. Sympathy would come later, Raymer knew, probably when she saw him. Saw the damage. Which in the warped mirror on the wall opposite where he sat, bare-assed, draped in a flimsy paper johnny, was pretty damn impressive. His broken nose was swollen hideously, and both eyes were slits.

He’d been told a doctor would be in to see him shortly, but that was nearly half an hour ago, and the examination room’s air-conditioning was in brutal contrast to the sweltering heat outside. His head throbbed dully, but apart from that he didn’t feel too bad, and certainly not as bad as he looked. The light-headed, elsewhere feeling he’d suffered prior to losing consciousness out at Hilldale was gone, as was the dizziness. He was tempted to just get dressed and leave, but instead of hanging up his sweaty uniform, he’d made the mistake of draping it over the AC unit. Putting it back on would be like donning a frigid, wet onesie. He shivered at the thought.

“Into the grave,” Charice repeated, apparently willing to concede the truth of what he was telling her but still unable to wrap her mind around what had happened. “Like…on top of the casket?”

“No,” he explained, “His Honor was still aboveground.”

“Why are you in the emergency room?”

“It was my face that broke the fall. But never mind that. Tell me again what happened out at the mill.” Because Charice wasn’t the only one having trouble processing recent events. “The whole building actually—”

“So you, like, slumped forward and rolled into the grave?”

“I fainted, Charice. Okay? You know that matting they edge graves with? They say I tripped over that, but I don’t really remember. Ask Gus. He saw the whole thing.”

And would be thrilled to recount the whole shitshow. According to the mayor, Raymer’s knees hadn’t buckled or anything. Rather, he’d gone down like a tree. “One minute you were standing there and the next it was—timber! You went into that hole like it was dug to your exact specifications. You were just gone. You know like when you try to stuff a cat in a bag? How there’s always a leg sticking out?”

Raymer had just blinked at him. Why would he have ever put a cat in a bag? Was Gus confessing to having drowned kittens at some point? Why did he imagine this was an experience other people would be familiar with?

“It wasn’t like that at all,” Gus insisted. “You went in clean and neat. There was just the one sound you made when you hit bottom and then the plume of dust. I don’t think I ever saw anything like it, and I was in Korea.”

Korea, where he’d spent the last seven months of the conflict, was Gus’s particular touchstone. It was one of the few times he’d been out of upstate New York for an extended period, and his experience on that misbegotten peninsula, even more than his graduate work in government, was the reason he believed himself qualified to be mayor of North Bath. Was it over there he’d done his cat stuffing?

“Charice,” he told her sternly. “I want to hear about the mill, all right? Because I don’t understand how that could happen. How does a whole building just…fall down?”

“Not the whole building,” she said, “just the north wall. The one facing Limerock Street.”

“The other walls are still standing? How can that be?”

“I’m just telling you what I was told.”

“By who?”

“Miller’s on the scene.”

“Miller.”

“Jerome’s there, too.”

“Jerome.”

“You’re repeating everything I say.”

“Your brother Jerome.” He worked for the Schuyler Springs PD and served as a liaison officer between the department and the college and the mayor’s office, doing exactly what Raymer wasn’t sure, except that he was required to be on television a lot, either attempting to explain the inexplicable or obfuscate the perfectly clear.

“It’s his day off, so he stopped by the station. He’s got this joke he wants to tell you. When the call came in about the mill, he figured we could use a hand.”

Raymer sighed. “Why’s he acting like this?” Because lately, Jerome had become increasingly solicitous about Raymer’s welfare, always stopping by the station on some pretense, telling him jokes and calling him buddy.

“He’s worried about you.”

“Why?”

“I’m worried about you.”

“Why?”

“Chief,” she said, as if the answer to this question was so obvious it needn’t be voiced. His head was hurting worse now. Probably because of the fall, but possibly not. His head often hurt when he talked to Charice. “I mean, imagine, okay?”

“Please,” he begged. Charice was forever asking him to imagine this or that, usually something extremely unpleasant. Like trying to put a cat in a bag, or some other Korean-type activity. “Please don’t.”

“Imagine you’re in a great big room with ten thousand other guys.”

“Actually, I’m in a small room, all by myself.”

“And the guy in charge says, ‘Okay, show of hands. Who’s passed out at a funeral—’ ”

“Stop, please.”

She ignored him, of course. Charice believed, for some reason, that a vivid imagination was the true path to understanding. “Passed out,” she repeated, “right into an open grave.”

“Desist,” he told her. “This is a direct order I’m giving here.”

“Yours would be the only hand in the air,” Charice noted. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“Charice.”

“Make it a hundred thousand guys, if you want. A million. It’s still just you with his hand up, Chief.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t have my hand up either,” Raymer said, reluctantly giving in to her scenario. “Why would I admit something like that in front of ten thousand other guys?”

“Imagine if you lied, you’d be electrocuted.”

“I’ve got a better idea. Imagine you work for me and you have to do what I say. Tell Jerome I don’t want to hear another stupid joke. Also, remind him he has no jurisdiction in Bath.”

“I’ll tell him, but you know Jerome.”

“I do. Also his sister. Two peas in a pod.” The metaphor was particularly apt in their case, as they were twins. “Have Miller come pick me up at the hospital.”

“He’s busy at the scene. Where’s your own car?”

“Out at the cemetery. Gus wouldn’t let me drive.”

“I’ll call Jerome then. He won’t mind.”

“Don’t,” he told her. “Do not call Jerome. I swear to God if he comes out here I’ll shoot him on sight.”

“Then you’ll have exactly zero friends. All you got now is him and me, and I won’t be your friend no more if you shoot my brother, ’cause that would be unnatural.”

“Anymore,” he said. “You won’t be my friend anymore.”

“There you go again. Making fun of how I talk. I’ma add that to my list.” Charice claimed to be compiling a list of all the workplace shit he gave her. It had several distinct, if, to Raymer’s mind, overlapping categories of abuse: illegal, immoral, actionable, insulting, bigoted and just plain wrong. She hadn’t showed him the list but claimed it was growing and pretty comprehensive.

“Do you have any idea how bad my head hurts right now, Charice?”

“That’s why they took you to the hospital. To get yourself checked out. Stay there, why don’t you. Jerome can handle things.”

“Miller, you mean. Miller can handle things. It’s Miller on our payroll, not Jerome.”

“Chief, we both know Miller can’t handle anything. Don’t matter whose payroll he’s on.”

“I don’t care,” Raymer said. “Send somebody out to get me. Anybody but your brother, okay? And make sure whoever it is brings that big bottle of extra-strength Tylenol I keep in my desk. And a Diet Coke. Come yourself if you have to.”

“Oh, I get it. This is a test, right? Last week you chew my ass out for leaving the switchboard to pee, and now you want to see if I learned my lesson.”

“Goodbye, Charice. In five minutes I’m going to be on that bench outside the hospital. Main entrance, not emergency. Somebody better be there.”

Head throbbing at a good beat now, he slid off the examination table and wobbled over to his clothes on the air conditioner. His jockeys, no surprise, were not only still soaked with sweat, but also very, very cold. Imagine—he could almost hear Charice say—what it’d feel like to pull those on. Like a wet bathing suit, all nasty and cold…up there in your private place. He closed his eyes and pulled them on and Charice was right, that was exactly how it felt.

—

HE’D NO SOONER PARKED himself on the bench outside the hospital’s main entrance than Jerome’s cherry-red Mustang convertible pulled up and stopped on a dime, tires screeching, chassis rocking. Jerome himself was at the wheel, of course. Nobody else was allowed to drive the ’Stang, not even Charice, who didn’t even want to, but hated on general principle being told she couldn’t. Her brother’s explanation — that this was the car made famous in Goldfinger, the one the blonde chick drove before Oddjob decapitated her with his magic bowler — only pissed her off even more, because it wasn’t really an explanation so much as a description, the kind of thing you’d say if you wanted to make certain you were both talking about the same vehicle. Raymer wasn’t sure he understood Jerome’s reasoning either. Part of it was that he didn’t want to risk wrecking his ’Stang, but Raymer suspected that what he really hated was the idea of somebody readjusting the seat. He was tall — six foot six — and had very long legs. Another driver would have to move the seat forward in order to reach the pedals, which meant he’d have to readjust it later, and what if he couldn’t find that exact comfortable position again, the one where his knees were ever so slightly flexed, his arms perfectly straight and the perfect distance from the wheel? He was similarly fussy about a lot of things. He really didn’t want people to visit his apartment, either. It wasn’t the company he objected to. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy it, but people were forever picking things up and then setting them down in the wrong place. And he particularly hated for people to use his bathroom. “I can’t help it,” he explained. “I don’t like other people defecating where I do.” “Obsessive-compulsive” was the term Charice used to describe his fastidiousness, claiming he’d been like that even as a child.

When it came to the ’Stang, though, he was beyond any diagnosis. Raymer could tell he didn’t even like having anybody in the passenger seat, but he was willing to make exceptions for good-looking women. And since Raymer hardly fell into that category, he had to wonder if Charice hadn’t had to twist her brother’s arm to get him to fetch him at the hospital. He hoped so, because if Jerome had volunteered his services it would confirm what he’d lately been sensing — that he was behaving more and more strangely.

Rolling down the window, he said, as he always did, absolutely deadpan, “The name is Bond. Jerome Bond.” Part of the joke was that his and Charice’s last name was actually Bond. “Are you bleeding?” he wanted to know. “Because these are genuine-leather seats.”

Raymer made no move to rise from the bench.

“You gonna get in?”

“I’m still thinking.”

“There’s your problem right there,” Jerome said. Like his sister, he spent far too much time diagnosing Raymer’s problems. “Best nip that habit right in the bud, bud. Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance, there’s no telling where it could lead.”

“I told Charice I’d shoot you on sight if you showed up here, so what do you do?”

“Yeah, but see? I already got the drop on you.” Jerome’s left hand, on which he wore a special fingerless driving glove, gripped the wheel. When he raised his right, it held his revolver. Raymer sighed. It was a joke, sure, but to Raymer’s way of thinking Jerome unholstered his weapon way too often. He never pointed it at anyone, of course, preferring to strike the classic James Bond pose, with the barrel pointed straight up, but he seemed to enjoy reminding people he was armed and that as a cop, black or not, he was allowed to be. “Come on and get in, before any blood gets shed.”

Raymer rose, went around the car and opened the door, pleased to see that Jerome’s revolver had disappeared back into its holster, or at least so he assumed. Still, he hesitated before getting in, because there was nothing Jerome liked more than peeling out the split second Raymer’s ass hit the seat, the passenger door still open. “See that sign? QUIET? HOSPITAL ZONE? MAXIMUM SPEED FIFTEEN MILES PER HOUR?”

“You worry entirely too much.”

“Yeah?” Raymer said, cautiously climbing in. “Well, I have my—” Reasons was how he meant to finish his sentence, but Jerome hit the gas, tires squealing, violently thrusting him back into the bucket seat, conking his skull on the headrest with the explosion of a million bright shards.

“You should only worry about things you have control over,” Jerome was saying as the ’Stang fishtailed out of the parking lot. “The other shit you have to just let go. Otherwise it’s like…a sickness…a cancer that’ll eat away at your guts until one day—”

“Goddamn, Jerome,” Raymer said. “Please, please shut the fuck up.”

Then his radio barked. “Chief? Your ride show up?” Unless he was mistaken he heard a chortle.

“You and I are going to have to have a long talk, Charice,” Raymer told her.

“Oh, goodie.” And the radio went dead again.

He regarded Jerome for a moment, then closed his eyes. “Tell me you brought the Tylenol.”

“Glove compartment.”

Inside, like a chalice in a tabernacle, sat his big plastic bottle of five hundred Tylenol capsules. The only other thing in the glove box was, incredibly, the owner’s manual. Badly as he needed the painkillers, Raymer couldn’t help himself. Dumbfounded, he took out the manual, which was encased in plastic like a library book. “Who has the owner’s manual to a ’sixty-four Mustang?”

Jerome looked away, embarrassed, as a normal man might when his secret stash of Penthouses was discovered. “Those things are collectors’ items, man. Hundreds of dollars. I had to special order it.”

Raymer regarded him. “You special ordered a Mustang owner’s manual.”

Jerome shrugged.

“And I have problems?” He tossed the manual back into the glove box for the pleasure of seeing Jerome wince. Later, once he got rid of Raymer, he’d probably pop the compartment open and lovingly recenter the booklet.

“Okay,” he said when they came to the T-intersection at the end of the long hospital road. The traffic light was red, so he put his left-turn blinker on, toward town, then turned to watch Raymer struggle with the childproof plastic cap on the Tylenol bottle. “So this guy goes to the doctor and says, ‘I’m all stopped up. Haven’t defecated in a week.’ ”

“Defecated,” Raymer repeated, marveling as he often did at how completely Jerome had excised North Carolina from his diction. Charice had as well, though unlike her brother, she enjoyed the vernacular and slid into and out of both dialects with ease. This Raymer found profoundly disorienting, like dealing with a split personality.

“Shit,” Jerome clarified.

“I know what it means. In a joke the guy’d say shit or maybe take a crap.”

“Maybe he’s refined,” Jerome suggested. “Not everybody’s like you. Anyhow, it’s been a week since he defecated, so the doctor writes him a prescription for suppositories.”

Suddenly, Charice was on the radio again. “Oh, and another thing? When the wall fell down?”

“Yeah?” Raymer said, both thumbs clawing under the lip of the cap, his face purple with fruitless exertion, the plastic having somehow fused at the molecular level with the bottle itself.

“You gotta line up the little arrows,” Jerome offered helpfully.

The problem was Raymer couldn’t really see the damn things, not without his glasses, and he wasn’t about to put them on now. The arrows sort of felt more or less aligned, but maybe not. He tried adjusting them a smidge, but no fucking luck.

Jerome held out his hand. “You want me to—”

“No.”

“You still there, Chief?” Charice wanted to know.

“I’m here all right.”

“It fell on a car,” she informed him.

“A parked car?”

“Uh-uh. Moving. Apparently that wall came down just as it was passing by. What are the odds, right?”

Next she’d want him to calculate them.

“The good news is the vehicle in question was a beater.”

“Is this a joke, Charice?” Because her twin brother and tag-team partner was sitting right next to him, also telling him a joke, and to Raymer, his head throbbing, it seemed possible the two jokes might be related by something other than the tellers’ desire to torment him. “Are you going to tell me the bad news is that the driver was killed?”

Exasperated, Jerome grabbed the pill bottle, deftly lined up the arrows, popped the cap, shook out two capsules and handed them to Raymer, who swallowed them without benefit of liquid.

“Where’s the cotton ball?” Jerome now demanded.

Raymer just looked at him.

“You know, the little cotton ball they always put in the mouth of the bottle?”

“Like any sensible person, I threw that away two seconds after I opened it.”

“They put that there for a purpose, Doug.”

“Right,” he agreed. “To make it harder to get the pills out.”

“No, to keep them fresh.”

“Explain to me how that would work, Jerome.”

He would’ve put the cap back on if Raymer hadn’t held the bottle tight, shook free a third pill and gulped it down.

“From a liability standpoint it’s lucky the car was a beater, is what I’m saying,” Charice explained. “It could’ve been a new Lexus or a BMW. The driver might’ve come straight from the showroom. Whereas—”

“Charice. Was anyone injured?”

“The driver got a broken arm. Possibly other injuries, according to Miller.”

“Miller,” Raymer repeated. “So basically we have no idea. The guy could be dead.”

“No, he’s at the hospital. You didn’t see him there?”

“Do me a favor, Charice? Call the city engineer and see if the traffic light at the hospital intersection’s working properly. We’ve been sitting here for like ten minutes.”

No response. She could go mute when asked to perform tasks that fell outside her normal purview.

“So a couple days later the guy runs into the doctor on the street,” Jerome continued, apparently having concluded from his sister’s silence that she was off doing as instructed. “He’s limping along…can barely move. That’s how long it’s been since he defecated. The doctor can’t believe it. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Those pills didn’t work?’ ”

“You want to hear the strange part?” Charice interrupted.

Raymer closed his eyes and rested his head against the seat back, trying to gauge how much longer the painkillers would take to kick in. “Stranger than the part where the factory wall falls on a passing motorist for no reason?”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s a reason, Chief,” Charice assured him. “Things don’t just happen for no reason. We just don’t know what it is yet.” No question, she and Jerome were twins. They both believed in a world where cotton balls had a purpose.

“There’s a competing theory, Charice. There are people — smart people — who believe that everything happens for no reason.”

“Yeah, okay, but guess who was driving that car?”

“Charice.”

“It’s going to make you very happy.”

“Well, it can’t be Jerome, because he’s sitting right next to me.”

“Get serious. Take a guess.”

“Okay, Donald Sullivan.”

“That’s not very nice,” Charice said, clearly taken aback.

Raymer had to admit she was probably right. It wasn’t nice. But Barton Flatt was already dead, and he honestly couldn’t think of anybody else he wanted to be the victim of a freak accident.

“Roy Purdy,” she blurted, apparently unable to keep the good news to herself any longer.

“Why would I be happy about that?”

“Because he’s an asshole.”

Okay, maybe he was a little happy. He’d run into Roy at the Morrison Arms the day after his release. The creep had moved in with a sad, overweight woman named Cora, who’d apparently fallen for him, and he couldn’t have been more smarmy and obsequious. In jail Roy had found religion, or so he claimed. Before, he’d apparently used his time behind bars to hone his criminal skills, but in this stint his Bible-study and psychology classes had allowed him to emerge as a wholly new and improved man. The old Roy, he’d assured Raymer, was dead and gone. All he could hope was that people wouldn’t hold that Roy against him. He was anxious that Raymer in particular didn’t harbor any ill will about when they were kids and Roy used to bully him relentlessly. None of that had been personal, he explained. He’d just been looking for somebody to take out his anger on. This last spell, with the help of an older con, he’d learned to let go of all that anger. It was rage that had stolen his whole damn life, and with the help of his newly acquired anger-management skills he meant to steal it right back. Perhaps not the best metaphor for a career thief, Raymer remembered thinking. Still, he supposed it was possible the man had truly been reformed. What undermined this likelihood was the note of pride in his voice when he recalled those middle-school days when he’d been the endless scourge of timid boys like Raymer.

“You’d rather have a wall fall on a harmless old coot like Sully,” Charice said, “than on a true lowlife like Roy Purdy. That’s just sick.”

Truth be told, Raymer had no idea why Sullivan had occurred to him first. He’d resented the man for so long it’d become a habit, he supposed. “Well,” he said in his own defense, “it’s Sully that stole our three wheel boots, remember.”

“We don’t know that,” Charice countered.

“Sure we do,” he said. “What we don’t know is how. Or where he hid them. What’d you find out about the traffic light?”

“Nothing yet. How long would you say it was before it finally turned green?”

“We’re still sitting in front of it.”

“Really? All this time?” She sounded impressed.

“Goodbye, Charice.”

Jerome was grinning at him. “And the guy says, ‘Are you kidding me, Doc? I might as well have shoved them up my ass for all the good they did me.’ ”

Raymer waited a beat, then said, “Green.”

“Huh?”

He pointed, but by the time Jerome looked, the light had turned yellow, and before he’d let his foot off the clutch it was red again.

Raymer still hadn’t put the cap back on the pills, so he tapped a fourth into his palm.

“Is that a good idea?” Jerome said. “Four extra-strength Tylenols, all at once?”

Maybe not. In the ER they’d refused him painkillers until they were sure he hadn’t suffered a concussion. Two extra-strength Tylenols might put him in a coma; four could kill him. Good, Raymer thought. At least death would cure his headache. He could feel angry blood pulsing through the constricted vessels to his brain and the beat of his broken heart.

Because why not admit it? He wasn’t over her. Becka. Okay, so she’d made a fool of him. At the time she went down those stairs like a Slinky she’d been carrying on with somebody, maybe even somebody he knew. What was it the note said? Try to be happy for us. Like maybe he knew the guy. Probably not, though. Men just fell in love with her at first sight. On the spot. Just as he had. Anyway, face it. Charice was right. He was still fucked up. Here was Jerome just trying to help out, maybe take his mind off things, and Raymer, in turn, was wishing that wall had fallen on him instead of Roy Purdy.

“You have to admit it’s pretty funny,” Jerome said, apparently in reference to the suppositories joke.

“Laugh? I thought I’d die,” Raymer said, which was literally true. He was squirming now, shoving the bottle out of sight into his pocket. A couple dozen capsules were rattling around in there like tacks, and he was afraid if he didn’t put it away he might just swallow them all at once and be done with everything forever. The problem was that the bottle was too big; even if he succeeded in forcing it into his trousers, it would produce a comic bulge. This reminded him of the girl out at Hilldale who stared at him as he absentmindedly fingered the—

“Turn right,” he said, too loud, startling Jerome.

“What—”

“Go through the light! Hurry.”

But of course they were too late. By the time they arrived back at the cemetery, Judge Flatt’s grave had not only been filled in, the whole plot had been manicured. Both the yellow backhoe and Rub Squeers were gone. Raymer dropped to his knees in the moist earth, beneath which, under the old asshole’s casket, lay the garage-door opener. He’d been holding it in his hand when he fainted. Which meant his last chance to solve the riddle of his wife’s infidelity was gone, along with it his final opportunity to prove himself a real policeman and not just a joke. Something like a howl escaped his throat then, and the resulting pain in his skull was beyond belief. He gripped his head between his elbows to keep it from exploding.

Jerome put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I guess those Tylenol aren’t working, huh?”

No, they weren’t. Not even a little. In fact, he might as well have shoved them up his ass.

—

THE STILL, STAGNANT AIR in the vicinity of the Old Mill Lofts was the sort of yellow that normally presages a tornado, and the smell was staggering — yesterday’s stench on steroids. Raymer swallowed hard, trying to keep his roiling stomach in check. As they were driving over here, Charice had radioed again to say there was yet another problem. As if things weren’t bad enough, Carl Roebuck’s crew of merry idiots, jackhammering the concrete floor, had hit an underground power line, knocking out a nearby transformer and leaving most of Bath without electricity. At the station and out at the hospital, they’d converted to the backup generator.

“Go on back to Schuyler,” Raymer said when Jerome pulled over to the curb a couple blocks from the now-three-sided mill. Apparently the power outage stopped at the Schuyler Springs city line, right where misfortune historically ground to a halt. After all, if Raymer, whose job it was, wanted no part of these proceedings, what possible interest could they hold for a man whose job it wasn’t? “I can snag a ride back out to Hilldale later.” On the drive into town he realized that his car was still out at the cemetery. At the sight of the judge’s grave, all filled in, he’d been too distraught to think clearly.

“Nah, I’ll stick around a bit,” Jerome said, getting out and locking the ’Stang. “You don’t look so good.” Raymer, light-headed and jelly kneed, had all he could do to pull himself out of the car’s deep bucket seats.

What remained of the mill resembled a child’s dollhouse, its long front face thoughtfully removed so its insides could be examined. Officer Miller, flexing authoritatively at the knees, had cleverly stationed himself at the epicenter of activity, where he could serve, so far as Raymer could tell, no useful purpose. A Tip Top Construction truck was parked next to the mound of bricks from the collapsed wall, and those of Carl’s crew who weren’t busy depriving the town of electricity were tossing them into the back. Nearby, the impressively flattened car — how had Roy Purdy escaped with his life? — was being hoisted onto one of old Harold Proxmire’s flatbeds.

Miller stood observing all this as if it were his responsibility to make sure these jobs were being done properly. “Chief,” he said, clearly surprised to see Raymer approaching. “I thought you were out at the hospital.” Eyeing Jerome suspiciously, he gave his boss a quizzical what’s-he-doing-here look. Low man on the department totem pole, Miller worried constantly about being replaced, and Jerome, already in law enforcement, was a possible candidate. Also, he was black and Charice’s brother. Was there some sort of affirmative action/nepotism afoot here?

“Mind if I ask what you’re doing?” Raymer said.

Miller seemed pleased to know the answer to this question. “Providing a police presence, sir,” he said, as if reciting from a manual. “I heard you were at the hospital, so I—”

“How about moving those people back,” Raymer suggested, pointing at the gawkers that had gathered at the foot of one of the remaining walls. “Could you do that?”

“Because Charice said you’d sustained an injury out at Hilldale and I was in charge.” Giving orders, he meant. Not taking them.

“Yet here I am.”

Miller nodded. Clearly, he would’ve liked to dispute this fact, but how?

“Miller,” Raymer said, “please move those people back. Now.”

“You think another wall might fall?”

“This one did.”

When he trotted off, Raymer and Jerome joined the mayor, who’d come directly from Hilldale, still dressed in funeral attire, and Carl Roebuck, who was studying some sort of schematic diagram and scratching his head. “What the hell’s a power line doing there?”

“Providing power?” Gus suggested.

“Not anymore,” a worker said, resting his gut on a jackhammer.

“Uh-oh,” said Gus, eyeing the Niagara Mohawk truck that was just then pulling up. “We should’ve waited. NiMo’s gonna ream our asses.”

“My ass,” Carl corrected.

“Jesus, look at this,” Gus said, finally noticing Raymer. “They didn’t admit you?”

“I kind of checked myself out.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought you might need me?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Raymer said, annoyed to be talked to the way he’d just talked to Miller. “That’s what I came to find out.”

“It’s true I might want to borrow your sidearm,” Gus said. “I’m thinking about shooting Carl here. How you doin’, Jerome?”

“Mayor,” he said, and they shook hands. Surprised, Raymer wondered how they knew each other. Had he and Gus ever shaken hands?

“How come shit like this never happens in Schuyler?” was what Gus wanted Jerome to explain.

“There’s an ordinance against it,” Jerome said.

Carl rotated the schematic, considering it from a different angle, and offered it to the mayor. “Show me on this where there’s a power line.”

“Why would I show you on that when I can take you to the actual cable your guys just jacked the shit out of.”

“What I don’t get,” Jerome said, when Carl headed over to the NiMo crew, “is how a building can stand for a century and then one day tumble into the street.”

“Well,” Gus sighed, “several things have to happen. First, some imbecile has to sever the collar ties that secure the walls to the roof.”

“Why would anybody do that?”

“They were working on the penthouse units, is my understanding. They meant to retie them later.”

“Still,” Jerome said, “the floor joists—”

“Those were compromised a couple weeks ago in order to construct the interior stairwells.”

Jerome nodded seriously, apparently following all this.

How did normal people know shit like this? Raymer wondered. Or, to rephrase the question: How had he himself managed to live so long and learn so little? “Aren’t you curious?” Becka always said whenever he asked why she was reading this or that. “About the world and how it works? About people and what makes them tick?” He supposed she had a point. Curiosity was probably a good thing, not always a cat killer. Still, what made people tick was no great mystery, was it? Greed. Lust. Anger. Jealousy. You could almost let your voice fall right there. Love? Some people claimed it made the world go round, but he wasn’t so sure about that. Love mostly turned out to be one of those other emotions, or a mixture of them, in disguise. Even if it did exist, Raymer doubted its relevance to much of anything.

“Carl still might’ve got away with it,” Gus was saying, “if somebody down in the basement hadn’t lit a cigarette and tossed the match into a floor drain.”

“Gas pocket?” Jerome said, as far ahead of the game as Raymer was behind.

“Boom,” said Gus, puffing out his cheeks. “Maybe that’s the lesson. You can skate on the first idiocy, and maybe even the second, but the third brings down the wrath of God.” He regarded Raymer then as if he might be the physical embodiment of the principle he’d just articulated.

Suddenly the smell was just too much. “Excuse me a minute,” Raymer said, turning away. There was a convenient pile of rubble nearby and into this he vomited violently, hands on his knees, reluctant to straighten up until he was sure the worst of the nausea had passed. Everyone, even the NiMo guys, who’d been happily cutting Carl Roebuck a new asshole, stopped to watch him retch. Was he throwing up because of the heat and stench, Raymer wondered, or because he was concussed? It would’ve been good to know, but too much trouble to find out. Curiosity trumped yet again.

When he finally straightened up, Miller, having moved the spectators across the street, had returned to his previous post and was again pointlessly supervising the brick tossing.

Raymer went over and said, “Miller?”

“I did what you said, Chief,” he told him, gesturing at the people he’d moved out of harm’s way.

“Yes, you did,” Raymer agreed. “But look.” The spectators Miller had moved were mostly still there, but half-a-dozen newcomers were now standing right where they’d been.

“You want me to move them, too?”

Raymer nodded. “And this time?”

“Yeah?”

“Stay there. That’s where the job is. This here”—he indicated the men tossing bricks—“has got nothing to do with us.”

“He’s not what you’d call gifted, is he?” Jerome remarked when Raymer walked up.

“No,” he admitted, though for some unknown reason he felt an urge to come to the idiot’s defense. Probably because Miller seemed to have such a hard time grasping the same things that had eluded him as a young patrolman. No doubt he himself had exasperated his boss, Ollie North, as thoroughly as Miller was doing now. Police work, perhaps more than any other profession, attracted people for the wrong reasons — in Raymer’s case, the desire to be useful. You’d be given orders and you’d execute these to the best of your ability. It never occurred to him that part of the job was figuring out, without being told, exactly what the job was. Right from the start Ollie had encouraged him to act on his own initiative, to analyze the scene and figure out what needed to be done. Sure, there was plenty of mind-numbing repetition, but most days, especially in the beginning, you’d encounter something new, and there wasn’t always time for instructions. In their absence, though, young Officer Raymer had found himself assailed by not just the usual raft of self-doubts but also the old ambient feeling of futility that had been his more or less constant companion since he was a boy in a disorderly house that he’d wanted to put right, without having a clue where to begin. He knew nothing about Miller’s background but could recognize in him the same eagerness to please that so often went hand in hand with a reluctance to take chances. At every juncture, Miller had to be told what to do and then what to do next. Having been ordered to move people to safety, he’d done so. Since Raymer didn’t tell him to stay there and see the job through, he’d returned to his earlier post to await further orders. “I keep hoping he’ll grow into the job,” Raymer said weakly.

Jerome shrugged. “You put Charice out here, she’d have this whole deal organized in about two seconds flat.”

He was right, too. The station had been a nightmare of inefficiency until Charice arrived, everything in the wrong place. By the time you found what you were looking for, you’d forgotten why you needed it in the first place. Charice had made sense of it all, transforming the department into a well-oiled machine. For which she was universally resented. Not because her coworkers preferred chaos to order — they were cops, after all — but because she’d invaded their turf and changed things without asking for permission or even advice. She could be abrupt to the point of rudeness and clearly didn’t suffer fools gladly, perhaps not a particularly admirable quality when one is surrounded by a dozen of them. Out on the street, Raymer feared, she’d piss folks off even worse. People in Bath weren’t used to being ordered around by sharp-tongued black women. If she got sent out on a call to the Morrison Arms or Gert’s Tavern, she’d be lucky not to get beaten to death with her own baton, and if something like that ever happened, Raymer would have only himself to blame. “I need somebody with good judgment at the station,” he told Jerome, who just shrugged, as if to concede that the chief of police had every right to remain stupid.

Rejoining them, Gus put a hand on Raymer’s shoulder. “Go home before you pass out again,” he said. “This’ll all get worked out. You can die in the line of duty some other day.”

“All right,” Raymer agreed, too exhausted and dispirited to protest. Jerome wouldn’t mind dropping him off at the Arms before heading back to Schuyler. There he’d fall into bed and see what happened. Maybe all he needed was a nap. Or possibly he’d just sleep right on through to tomorrow. Or better yet die in his sleep. Maybe his fainting into the judge’s grave had been an omen — that his own end was near. If so, fine.

“Hey, Jerome,” Gus said as they turned to leave, “you given any more thought to what we discussed?”

“I’m still thinking,” Jerome told him.

“Don’t take too long.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

What the hell were they discussing that could only be alluded to obliquely in Raymer’s presence? Something he wasn’t supposed to know about, obviously.

God, did his head hurt.