“I came up here three years ago,” she went on, “thinking things would be different, but Barrel had me on radio for the first year. He only let me go out on road patrol after I threatened to sue him.
“So,” she said. “I learned the lesson. As a woman, if I want to get ahead in this line of work, I have to be more of a man than most men.”
I frowned at her. “So — you haven’t dated?”
“It would have compromised me,” she said. “The image I need to cultivate.”
I laughed. “Until I came along and destroyed your will to resist.”
She laughed back. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it’s hard keeping up the act.”
I sipped at my beer and sat back feeling very relaxed.
“How about you?” Dilly asked.
“How about what?”
“That friend of yours?” she said. “The one who was going to teach you how to ski.”
“Oh,” I said, putting a small smile on my face. “Sandy.”
Loretta nodded expectantly.
I sighed. “Well, she’s a lieutenant,” I said. “And she’s a little young for me, I guess.”
I see.
“I suppose we really never should have gotten involved. So we’ve... decided to call it off.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No big thing,” I told her.
“How do you feel about it?”
I put a mild look of concentration on my face. “I don’t really know.”
“Why?” Dilly asked.
“Why?”
She opened her mouth to rephrase the question but changed her mind. “Never mind,” she said with a smile. “None of my business.”
I made myself laugh. “I suppose,” I said, “it’s because I’m not letting myself think about it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m — on leave,” I replied stupidly.
“I see,” she said. “So, you’re just — on cruise control or something?”
“Something like that.”
She gave me a knowing kind of look then, and I thought she was going to ask more about it, but thank God, she dropped it.
We chatted a bit more about nothing much at all, but the psychochemistry of our species was hard at work; so when the place closed, on our way back to her car, Dilly and I held hands, and once we were inside, we kissed, and after we were on the highway, headed toward Big Pine, the sense that things were going too fast for me became acute and I didn’t really know what to do about it.
Which is something one expects more from a teenage girl than a forty-three-year-old man, but there it was.
I was confused.
This hadn’t been something I’d anticipated. Or rather it hadn’t been something I’d thought through. This was crazy. I needed to think about this. I needed to...
“I don’t know what we’re doing,” Dilly murmured, half to herself.
“I’m not that certain myself,” I admitted.
She glanced at me. “You’re a sweet man, Virginiak,” she said, putting a hand on my knee.
I took her hand in my own — and felt even more confused.
“So,” she said. “What now?”
I was still thinking it over like an idiot — still holding her hand but still thinking it over — when, a mile or so south of Big Pine, Daly’s radio chirped, and she called in.
“We got a 10–11, at Fremont’s Leather Shop in town, sheriff,” a woman’s voice told her. “Happened fifteen minutes ago.”
“Tell me, Mavis,” Dilly ordered.
“Suspect is male,” Mavis replied, “Indian, eighteen to twenty years old. About five ten, one seventy-five, black hair. He’s wearing a gray sweatshirt, khaki trousers, and a black cloth hat. Last seen heading north down along the old rail line.”
“What’d he take?”
“A thousand dollar coat, the owner said. Black leather and seal fur. Said he just came in and grabbed it off a store mannequin and took off.”
“Who’s responding?”
“Jerry is at the scene, Tom and Frank are cruising down around the old warehouses.”
Dilly gave me a questioning look, and I shrugged.
“I’m on the job, Mavis,” Dilly told her. “Tell Frank and Tom I’ll work up along the old river road toward them.”
“Roger that,” Mavis replied.
Dilly hung up her mike, then turned to me and said. “A 10–11 is shoplifting, but a thousand dollar pricetag makes it robbery one.” She gave me a questioning squint. “You don’t mind, do you?”
I told her I didn’t, feeling curiously relieved.
About a mile farther on, Dilly turned off the highway, crossed a bridge, and put us on a snow-covered road that edged a frozen river on the right and a railroad track that ran beside a steep-sided rocky hill on the left.
“If he’s come this way, he’s trapped himself,” she told me as she slowed down and killed her lights. “The river ice won’t hold a man’s weight, so we should have him boxed.”
She drove ahead by moonlight at about fifteen miles an hour, watching the road and track, which curved northwesterly toward Big Pine. The sky was jet black but bright with stars, and a new moon hung over the peaks to the north.
“Should spot him any minute now,” she murmured as she inched the Trans Am forward. “Any minute,” she repeated softly.
We’d been at it for about five minutes and could just make out the lights of the town about a mile ahead and to the right when the dark figure of a man appeared, hunch-shouldered, walking along the track.
“There he is!” she exclaimed, calling it in on the radio immediately.
The man spotted our car an instant later and started down off the tracks heading toward the iced-over river, but Dilly turned on her brights and stabbed the accelerator, which effectively cut him off from that route. He turned, got back up on the tracks, and started running back in the direction of town.
We paralleled his progress on the lower road for about a minute, but he stopped suddenly as the lights of two vehicles ahead — Frank’s and Tom’s, presumably — came into view, one on the tracks, and one on the road ahead of us.
“Stay put, okay?” Dilly told me as she stopped the car. She reached into the glove compartment, bringing out a 9mm Beretta, then gave me a brief smile as she jerked the door open and got out.
The man, who was then about ten yards away, was facing the other two cars and looking indecisive.
“You!” Dilly shouted at him. “Hey, you!”
The man spun around to face her. His eyes were wide and wild.
“You stay right where you are!” Dilly told him with force, pointing the weapon in his direction. “I mean it!”
The man looked left, right, then back at Dilly.
“Kneel down,” Dilly told him as she took a couple of steps up the incline. “Put your hands behind your head, and don’t do anything stupid.”
The man turned in the other direction as Frank and Tom got out of their cars.
“Did you hear me?” Dilly shouted angrily.
The man, who seemed young and scared, looked back at her.
“Kneel down, put your hands behind your head, and don’t do anything...”
Stupid! I thought as the young man bolted.
Stupid!
Down off the tracks, he started a slip-sliding run toward the river. Dilly, moving awkwardly in her high heels, stepped over to intercept him, but he was a lot stronger, or a lot more desperate than she probably thought, because he ran straight over her, knocking them both down.
Right, I thought. Great.
I started out of the car, hearing Dilly curse as she struggled with the man on the ground, hearing Frank and Tom shouting things as they charged forward. I’d just made it around the door to the front of the car when the man, not ten feet away, stood up, whirled around, and ran blindly straight toward me.