What the hell? he thought.
Lieutenant Railsback backed through the door, arms full. "Dinner on the boss," he announced, dumping his load atop Beth's work. "Got at least one of everything here. Grab whatever you want. How'd it go, Dad?"
"Not much yet. But we haven't really gotten going."
Beth offered Cash a phone as he was about to jump Hank for having messed with his reservations.
"Teri? Sergeant Cash again. I know you haven't seen him. Look, can I see you after you get off? Yeah. It's important. No. No problem. My lips are sealed, as they say. Okay. I'll pick you up then."
In the background, Hank was telling Beth, "You'd better go home, Tavares. Get a good night's sleep. I want you to come in tomorrow, and it might be a long day."
"I want to go with Norm to see John's wife. It'd help to have a woman there."
"Suit yourself." Railsback was too preoccupied to growl about being contradicted. "Dad, I don't like it when my people get shit on."
Cash hung up, grabbed something from the food heap, slipped into his own cubicle to ponder how best to break the news to Carrie and Teri.
"Henry, you can't drop everything because John disappeared." To Cash this sounded like the resumption of an interrupted argument. "You know there's a chance he just took off because he's having trouble with his wife."
That old man sees and hears a lot, Cash thought. And it's hard to tell what he knows. He just sits there like he's sleeping, and never says anything.
"You said that before. And you told me about the girl, too. And she ain't got nothing to do with it. You heard Norm talking to her."
"Maybe. And maybe she lied."
Cash took a savage bite from a cheeseburger. Suddenly, everybody seemed to know everything about everybody else's business. What do they have on me? he wondered.
Just thinking about it made him feel naked.
"Look," Railsback continued, "I ride these guys like a bronc-buster. And they put up with it because we get results. That makes me feel like I've got obligations to them. I've got responsibilities."
His father chuckled. "And that's why the captain calls you The Prussian. You think these are the Middle Ages? Noblesse oblige, and all that? One of your tenants is in trouble, so you drop the king's business while you save his ass? John's past saving, Henry. He's just another piece of the king's business now."
"Who taught me?"
"Touchй. But I'm just a burned-out old has-been. You ought to know better."
"Pop, I can't call it off now. We've come to the narrow passage. We can't turn back."
"I know. And I'm proud of you. But somebody has to play Jiminy Cricket around here."
"And somebody has to do the tilting at windmills. Norm can't carry that load by himself anymore."
"I just want you shouldn't forget what happened when Pandora opened that box."
"Sure. There's going to be a stink. Bleeding hearts up the yang-yang. The inspector's office on us like a snake on shit. Well, I'll give them something to sink their teeth into. I just hope those guys who make careers out of handcuffing us get an idea how hard they make it for us to protect them."
"They won't even see it."
"Yeah. I know."
Poor Hank, Cash thought. His city, his empire, is under siege. He's just like poor old Belisarius, rushing hither and yon in a frenetic, foredoomed effort to beat off the barbarians. And he doesn't doubt for a minute that his Justinian, the public, will reward him as kindly for his faithful service.
The Emperor had had Belisarius's eyes put out and had left him to beg at Constantinople's gates.
And John and I, his centurions, have been wasting ourselves for months, chasing Miss Groloch. What harm could one little old lady have done the general welfare? If we had left her alone, John would be here now…
We just had to keep on till it caught up with us, didn't we?
"What do you think really happened to the Kid, Pop?"
"The truth? I think he's dead."
"Why?"
"Because he wasn't the first. Otherwise, I'd put my chips on the girl friend."
The phone rang. A moment later Beth announced, "Sergeant Kurland says there's a man from the government on his way up here."
"What kind? "Hank asked.
"He didn't say. Except he wants to talk about Dr. Smiley. And he doesn't look like he's from the FBI."
"Shit, what're we into now?"
"No imagination, that man," Harald had said of his boss. But he had been wrong. Dead wrong.
Henry Railsback's problem, in Cash's opinion, was a surfeit, not a paucity, of imagination. Norm had been acquainted with the man since high school, when Hank had come in with one of the police public relations teams. Norm had expressed an interest in getting into police work. Hank had taken him around on a few of his patrols.
Cash knew things he had never told John.
Hank's hadn't been a happy youth. His mother had been a violent alcoholic. His father, so much like the man he himself had become, had been too timid to spend much time in the bitter trenches of the home front.
It had taken the death of Abigail Railsback, in a wrong-way auto crash, to bring father and son together, watering a grave with tears, raising a late-blooming relationship.
The boy Henry, even as a young officer, had hidden in the worlds of comic books, pulp magazines, serial movies, and daydreams. He had gone adventuring across landscapes of illusion because, for him, reality was a colorless desert. By taking to wife the first woman willing he had firmly established a marriage that soon had become a Sahara of misery.
He had dreamed great dreams then, had Henry Railsback, and within his mind he still conquered nations and continents, pitched no-hitters, outdrew the fastest guns… Though now he now longer possessed a shred of hope that such things could come to be. Time pulled down hopes and optimisms like wolves coursing round the flanks of the herd.
And in real life he seldom risked his precious self by testing the limits of his competence. He feared it would not measure up even to his low expectations.
Cash knew, and understood. Because Hank's story was not much different from his own. Just longer and a little more up and down.
In externals Hank had learned to cope by becoming an arch-conservative, a champion of null-change, a messiah of don't-rock-the-boat.