Chapter 8

When we met back at the Blazer I said to Cecelia, "You know, we're goin' about this all wrong."

She looked at me – she's known me since 1994 and knows that however lazy I might have seemed over the years, and however casual my methods, I'm a good investigator. "How is that, Darvin?" she asked.

"Well, this guy ain't doin' whores and pushers and wild university kids. He's poppin' bums. An' they mostly find a corner or a shelter somewheres an' sleep at night, an' come out in the daytime. You run across many bums on your way?"

"I had wondered why I was mostly encountering prostitutes, their customers, and people who appeared to be students at UNM. I ought to have thought of it."

"Me too. I guess I'm so used to dealin' with the night crowd that it just slipped me. But they's a good side to it – we'll get to sleep at night an' be awake during the day."

Cecelia nodded. "I have never tried working nights," she said, "and I confess that the prospect of doing so did not enthrall me."

"Not me neither. I've done it, a few times, when it was necessary ... an' so have you, even if you don't remember it."

She looked startled, and then I could see her remember. "It's been only a few months, and I've already forgotten my time in a patrol car." She smiled at me, her teeth gleaming in the faint light. "I can hardly blame myself for wanting to forget the one part of my police experience that I can't chase from my mind, but it is incredible that I forgot working the night watch."

I shrugged. "They ain't a whole lot memorable about the middle o' the night in Red Hawk. They ain't enough people in the whole county to make a good small town, an' Red Hawk's dyin'. But there's more you've forgot – you worked a few nights when we was huntin' the guy who raped Burque."

"I may excuse that spasm of forgetfulness by mentioning that it was two years ago, and much has happened in the intervening time. Nevertheless, I am unpleased with my lapse."

"Yeah, it was doubleplus ungood," I said with a grin, knowing she'd recognize the reference.

"I too have encountered Newspeak," she said, "and I do not desire to speak it. Kindly clap Big Brother back within the pages of the book."

"Sure," I said, and unlocked my door – we'd been talking across the hood of the Blazer. "I was 19 in 1984 – for that matter we both of us were. It was interesting hitting that year, and comparing it to what Orwell wrote."

Cecelia had fished out her keys and unlocked her door, and now we both swung into our seats, though I'd taken a moment to pull off my gun and stick it in the clip under the seat. As I pulled my door shut and fastened my seatbelt, Cecelia was putting her pistol in the glove compartment. "Many things he described have not yet come to pass," she said, "though of course we're both aware that the precise year has to do not with prediction, but with the date of writing. Yet I cannot help observing the progress, so called, of things, and thinking that we are not as far from the novel as we were 26 years ago."

"Nope," I said, turning the key. I put the gearshift into first, let in the clutch, and took off. "Leave us hope we never do arrive there."

"I would prefer not to experience that society – nor, for that matter, that which Orwell depicted in Animal Farm."

I grunted. "We already got some animals which is more equal than others."

"And we have grammar which is far below the standard I have attempted to hold you to," Cecelia said.

I grinned. "Ain't it fun learnin' how to talk free an' easy, without all them pesky rules?"

"They are rules which you are capable of adhering to quite as well as I can, when you choose to. Did I not know better, I would think that you deliberately flout the laws of English grammar."

"But you do know better." I'd managed to navigate out of Nob Hill by then, and was heading north on Carlisle toward Menaul. "I do – I admit it – know how to talk good, an' I do when I want to. But most of the time I'm just as casual as you can get an' still be speakin' English. It ain't defiance, it's just laziness."

"That is an adjective which I find it difficult to associate with you, despite your habit, for years, of taking a case only when you felt like it, and in consequence working very little." She paused. "I assert that it is now time for you to speak to me of why Indians were not lazy, no matter what white chroniclers of the pioneer period claimed."

"Sure. It's simple, really – they worked when work was necessary, and worked brutally hard when that was necessary. But when it wasn't necessary to work, they knew how to relax as well."