“Go ahead and find out.”

“Don’t believe I will. Don’t believe I need to.” He leaned back; his office chair uttered another longsuffering squall. “Why would you want the job of night knocker in a pissant little burg like this? It only pays a hundred dollars a week, and while it doesn’t amount to much in the way of trouble Sunday to Thursday, it can be an aggravation on Friday and Saturday nights. The strip club in Penley closed down last year, but there are several ginmills and juke joints in the immediate area.”

“My grandfather was a night knocker in Hibbing, Minnesota. The town where Bob Dylan grew up? This was after he retired from the State Police. He was the reason I wanted to be a cop when I was growing up. I saw the sign, and just thought . . .” Tim shrugged. What had he thought? Pretty much the same thing as when he’d taken the job in the recycling plant. A whole lot of nothing much. It occurred to him that he might be, mentally speaking, at least, in sort of a hard place.

“Following in your grandpop’s footsteps, uh-huh.” Sheriff John clasped his hands over his considerable belly and stared at Tim—those bright, inquisitive eyes deep in their pockets of fat. “Consider yourself retired, is that the deal? Just looking for something to while away the idle hours? A little young for that, wouldn’t you say?”

“Retired from the police, yes. That’s over. A friend said he could get me security work in New York, and I wanted a change of scene. Maybe I don’t have to go to New York to get one.” He guessed what he really wanted was a change of heart. The night knocker job might not accomplish that, but then again it might.

“Divorced, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Kids?”

“No. She wanted them, I didn’t. Didn’t feel I was ready.”

Sheriff John looked down at Tim’s application. “It says here you’re forty-two. In most cases—probably not all—if you’re not ready by then . . .”

He trailed off, waiting in best cop fashion for Tim to fill the silence. Tim didn’t.

“You may be headed to New York eventually, Mr. Jamieson, but right now you’re just drifting. That fair to say?”

Tim thought it over and agreed it was fair.

“If I give you this job, how do I know you won’t take a notion to just drift on out of here two weeks or a month from now? DuPray idn’t the most interesting place on earth, or even in South Cah’lina. What I’m asking, sir, is how do I know you’re dependable?”

“I’ll stick around. Always assuming you feel like I’m doing the job, that is. If you decide I’m not, you’ll can me. If I should decide to move on, I’ll give you plenty of notice. That’s a promise.”

“Job’s not enough to live on.”

Tim shrugged. “I’ll find something else if I need to. You want to tell me I’d be the only guy around here working two jobs to make ends meet? And I’ve got a little put by to get started on.”

Sheriff John sat where he was for a little while, thinking it over, then got to his feet. He did it with surprising agility for such a heavy man. “You come around tomorrow morning and we’ll see what we’re gonna do about this. Around ten would be about right.”

Which will give you plenty of time to talk to Sarasota PD, Tim thought, and see if my story checks out. Also to discover if there are other smudges on my record.

He stood himself and stuck out his hand. Sheriff John’s grip was a good strong one. “Where will you be staying tonight, Mr. Jamieson?”

“That motel down the way, if there’s a vacant room.”

“Oh, Norbert’ll have plenty of vacant rooms,” the sheriff said, “and I doubt if he’ll try to sell you any of the herb. You’ve still got a little of the cop look about you, seems to me. If you don’t have a problem digesting fried food, Bev’s down the street is open until seven. I’m partial to the liver and onions, myself.”

“Thanks. And thanks for talking to me.”

“Not at all. Interesting conversation. And when you check in at the DuPray, tell Norbert Sheriff John said to give you one of the good rooms.”

“I’ll do that.”

“But I’d still take a look for bugs before you climb into the rack.”

Tim smiled. “I already got that advice.”

7

Dinner at Bev’s Eatery was chicken-fried steak, green beans, and peach cobbler to follow. Not bad. The room he was assigned at the DuPray Motel was a different matter. It made the ones Tim had stayed in during his ramble north look like palaces. The air conditioner in the window rattled busily, but didn’t cool things off much. The rusty shower head dripped, and there seemed to be no way to stop it. (He finally put a towel under it to muffle the clockwork sound.) The shade on the bedside lamp was burned in a couple of places. The room’s one picture—an unsettling composition depicting a sailing ship crewed entirely by grinning and possibly homicidal black men—hung crooked. Tim straightened it, but it immediately fell crooked again.

There was a lawn chair outside. The seat sagged and the legs were as rusty as the defective shower head, but it held him. He sat there with his legs stretched out, slapping at bugs and watching the sun burn its orange furnace light through the trees. Looking at it made him feel happy and melancholy at the same time. Another nearly endless freight appeared around quarter past eight, rolling across the state road and past the warehouses on the outskirts of town.

“That damn Georgia Southern’s always late.”

Tim looked around and beheld the proprietor and sole evening employee of this fine establishment. He was rail thin. A paisley vest hung off his top half. He wore his khakis high-water, the better to display his white socks and elderly Converse sneakers. His vaguely ratlike face was framed by a vintage Beatle haircut.

“Do tell,” Tim said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Norbert said, shrugging. “The even’ train always goes right through. The midnight train most always does unless it’s got diesel to unload or fresh fruit n vegimals for the grocery. There’s a junction down yonder.” He crossed his index fingers to demonstrate. “The one line goes to Atlanta, Birmin’am, Huntsville, places like ’at. T’other comes up from Jacksonville and goes on to Charleston, Wilmington, Newport News, places like ’at. It’s the day freights that mostly stop. Y’all thinkin about warehouse work? They usually a man or two short over there. Got to have a strong back, though. Not for me.”

Tim looked at him. Norbert shuffled his sneakers and gave a grin that exposed what Tim thought of as gone-country teeth. They were there, but looked as if they might be gone soon.

“Where’s your car?”

Tim just kept looking.

“Are you a cop?”

“Just now I’m a man watching the sun go down through the trees,” Tim said, “and I would as soon do it alone.”

“Say nummore, say nummore,” Norbert said, and beat a retreat, pausing only for a single narrow, assessing glance over his shoulder.

The freight eventually passed. The red crossing lights quit. The barriers swung up. The two or three vehicles that had been waiting started their engines and got moving. Tim watched the sun go from orange to red as it sank—red sky at night, sailor’s delight, his night knocker gramp would have said. He watched the shadows of the pines lengthen across SR 92 and join together. He was quite sure he wasn’t going to get the night knocker job, and maybe that was for the best. DuPray felt far from everything, not just a sidetrack but a damn near no-track. If not for those four warehouses, the town probably wouldn’t exist. And what was the point of their existence? To store TVs from some northern port like Wilmington or Norfolk, so they could eventually be shipped on to Atlanta or Marietta? To store boxes of computer supplies shipped from Atlanta so they could eventually be loaded up again and shipped to Wilmington or Norfolk or Jacksonville? To store fertilizer or dangerous chemicals, because in this part of the United States there was no law against it? Around and around it went, and what was round had no point, any fool knew that.