Chapter 8

That day, after my plate of hash browns at the Hawk House, I crisscrossed Red Hawk, going from business to business without any particular plan in mind. My goal wasn't so much to be systematic, as to emulate to some degree a cop on patrol. Even the investigators – the department now had five including me, whereas at the time I'd left they'd only had two – who didn't do regular patrol, would have engrained habits. And if an investigator had gotten into corruption while driving a cruiser, it was doubtful that he'd give up his old ways entirely or all at once. So my plan – if you can call it a plan – was to more or less make like an ordinary cop, and see if someone somewhere would tell me something.

Of course, that plan wouldn't get me far if none of the officers were dirty. I hoped they were all good cops, but it's mighty hard to prove a negative. You can find evidence that someone's taking bribes or extorting things, but how do you find objective proof that he never did that? Actions leave a trail, but inaction leaves nothing. Think about it a minute – if you tell me that you've never been to Spain, how do you prove that you've never been to Spain? If you point to the lack of Spanish souvenirs I can reply that you just didn't buy any. If you mention that you don't speak Spanish, I mention that a lot of tourists don't, and that most everyone in the world speaks English to some degree anyway. If you tell me that your word ought to be enough, I reply that any crook in the pen could make the same claim. How do you prove what you didn't do? That problem is part of why our system presumes that suspects are innocent until the prosecution proves their guilt. It would be unfair to force every suspect to prove that he didn't do the crime.

If all the department's officers were clean, I would almost certainly never find solid proof of it. But if after a good, hard, thorough investigation I didn't find any evidence of corruption, that would be a good sign that corruption didn't exist. When people are doing wrong, they leave tracks, and if I looked hard enough I could find the tracks. If I didn't, it would be grounds for concluding that no tracks were there. If a coyote's crossed a gully I can read his sign, but if I go up and down the gully and don't see any coyote tracks, I can pretty well figure that no coyote has crossed it – not since the last flash flood, anyway.

After a morning of finding no tracks, I headed back toward the Hawk House. I'd need to talk to the people there too, but for now I was just hungry. Abbie was at the register, and I asked her if Vernon was cooking. He was, so I strolled back to the kitchen. A waitress tried to stop me – she was young, and I didn't know her – but I flashed my tin and went on in. I stayed by the door, since I wasn't about to put on a hairnet unless I really had to, but Vernon spotted me and came over. We shook hands without speaking, then he jerked his thumb at the grill. "Same t'ing as always, Darvin?"

"Yeah – you remember?"

"Oh yeah, I remember. How I ever gonna forget you an' your strange taste?" And he smiled at me before returning to his work.

Back out in the restaurant I looked around. What I thought of, now that I was back on duty, as "my" table was open. It usually had been when I'd lived here before – it had a view, but it was in a corner that was darker than the rest of the place, and people generally didn't like it. I preferred it because it allowed me to keep my back to the wall; in the corner I actually had protection on two sides. I try not to be paranoid, and since quitting police work I've succeeded, but no cop ever got hurt by being too careful. And if there really were corrupt cops in town, they'd want to stifle me before I got too far in – and since I was only a "temp" in the department they might take chances with me that they wouldn't otherwise.

Of course, the odds were that even if half the cops in town were dirty, they wouldn't do a thing to harm me. It's one thing to have to shoot someone who's resisting arrest with a gun in his hand, and it's something very different to take out a cop who's investigating you. Cops especially know what happens to cop killers; "shot while resisting arrest" might in such a case be the euphemism that it almost never is, despite the cries of the cop-haters. Anyone who's any sort of a cop at all knows the power of his weapon and knows the finality of death. Most cops never draw their weapons in the line of duty, and most of those who do never fire, and most of those who do never hit anything – but even in a department as small as Red Hawk's there was the awareness that it only takes one bullet to end life forever. I would be careful – even more careful than I always am – but almost certainly no one would make any sort of run at me. But it never hurts to be careful; I'd learned that growing up in the desert, where simply being careful could mean the difference between dying of snakebite in the middle of nowhere, and not even knowing the snake had been there.

When a waitress came to the table with her pad ready, I showed my badge again and said, "Vernon's fixing me something."

She stared at me. "You know Vernon?"

"Oh yeah – I knew him when, I suspect, you were still in diapers."

She had the kind of feisty personality I like. She put her hands on her hips and asked, "How do you know, mister, when I was in diapers?"

"Well," I said, "it was nearly 20 years ago, and since you're not over 21..."

Now she was probably over 30, but that kind of compliment almost never fails. It didn't this time. "Mister, you can just sit at my table anytime. I'll bring your order out when it's ready ... uh, how will I know it's yours?"

"If you're not sure, ask Vernon."

"Okay, I'll do that."

And she walked off, stepping a little lighter than before.

When she came back a few minutes later with my plate in hand, she smiled at me. "I knew it was yours, all right – we don't sell this kind of thing here."

"I bet you do today."

"Oh hush, you!" And she set my plate down. "I absolutely forgot to ask you what you wanted to drink."

"Sweet tea, please." In the south you have to specify, or else they'll ask you if you want sweet or unsweet. Church fellowships have two pitchers of tea, one of each sort. Cecelia's cured me of using as much sugar as I used to, but I suspected I'd still add a bit to the sweet tea; if I got unsweet I'd bankrupt the restaurant sweetening it up, since they always make it stronger than I like.

"Okay, honey," the waitress said, and went to get my drink.

I looked at my plate. Vernon remembered, all right. He'd fried up a burger well done and put two or three slices of Swiss cheese on it while it was still on the grill, and they'd melted just enough to drape over the edges. I saw the lettuce and tomatoes and dill pickles and onion slices and bacon under the bun, and a thick slather of mustard. And right on top, I saw as I took the top bun off, were the slices of avocado that were my personal touch. I'm no cook, but long ago Vernon had asked me what my ideal meal would be, and I'd described it to him. From then on he'd been making me these burgers, and if I'd known he was cooking that first night we'd been in town, I'd have gone back and gotten him to make me one. And the fries piled on the plate were golden brown and crispy. Even Cecelia doesn't make better french fries than Vernon; hers are as good, but not better. And though I'd taught her about my favorite burger even before we got married – we hadn't had a long engagement, but it was a very close one – I had to admit that as good as she cooks, Vernon had done as well with the burger as she could.

I took a healthy bite. It was as good as I remembered. By the time the waitress returned I'd put down three bites. She put my glass of tea down and watched me for a second. "Is it good?" she asked.

"It's fantastic. Here – lemme give you a bite." And before she could protest I'd taken my knife and cut off a hunk. I speared it with my fork and held it out. She hesitated and then leaned down and took it off the fork with her lips, sort of like a horse lipping sugar from your palm.

I watched as she chewed. Her eyes opened wide and she smiled. "You know, honey, that is good." Only in the south do you find women calling you honey or sugar and meaning nothing by it.

"Sure is."

"Well, you enjoy your meal, all right?"

"I'll do that," I said, and smiled as I took another big bite.

As I went to pay my check, Abbie said, "I hear you're a cop again."

"Yeah – temporarily. They ain't no way I'm gonna do it permanent."

Abbie was one of the people to whom my eccentric speech wasn't surprising; she didn't know the difference. She just said, "I see. Well, you get the police discount."

"Sure – how much do I owe y'all then?"

"Half." She picked up a calculator to figure it; when I'd been a cop here she'd used pencil and paper. She got the answer and told me what it was.

As I counted out the bills and change, I asked, "Do any of the cops try to take advantage of the discount?"

Abbie is one of those people who will never win prizes for quick thinking. "Take advantage?"

"Yeah."

"Of the discount?"

"Yeah."

"What's that mean?"

"Maybe they insist on free meals, or they come in every day, or in some other way try to get more out of the place than is right."

"Why you wanna know?"

I leaned on the counter by the register and lowered my voice. There were other people here, unlike the 7-11, and I definitely wanted a little privacy. "I'm looking into the possibility of dirty cops. I hope there aren't any, but if there are I wanna find 'em and bust 'em."

"Dirty cops?"

"Abbie," I said, "you really don't have to repeat everything I say." As I spoke I remembered I'd had to tell her that before – more than once. Every time I turned around something was calling up a memory. "I don't mean to be a pain, but what I need is answers, not echoes."

"Okay, okay." She busied herself for a minute making change; it was quicker than it had been when she'd used an old fashioned register instead of the modern computerized job that now told her how much change I should get. Some cashiers can make change in their heads as fast as a computer – though fewer, now, than there had been before computers. "Okay," she said, handing my change, "I know what you're talking about. But I don't know about no dirty cops. They come in, they get the discount, that's all I know."

"So none of them abuse it?"

"All I know is they get the discount."

I looked at her for a moment. We'd gotten along all right when I was here before, but almost the first thing she'd done our first evening in town had been to chastise me about Tina – granted that I deserved it. It seemed that she still bore me a bit of a grudge, though why I didn't know, since she'd never been close to Tina. Come to think of it, I didn't know that she'd ever been close to anyone. At any rate, something didn't seem quite right about her staunch refusal to give more than a vague answer, an answer that told me nothing. I decided to back off – and to keep Abbie in mind for the future.

Police cars don't have CD players. I missed the one in my truck, for I couldn't get much on the radio. There was a country station that came in good, but it played too much "new country" for my taste. "New country" is a phrase that's half right – the stuff is new. But if Keith Urban's music is country, then whatever Hank Williams played couldn't have been. And I couldn't get anything else to come in well; whether it was the radio or the radio situation in the area I didn't know. Back in my Red Hawk days I'd not been so addicted to the radio as I am now, for I'd come from a place where about the only stations you could get were KFI in Los Angeles, KDWN in Las Vegas, and the Needles radio station, whose call letters I can never remember – but then it was a forgettable station.