Clyde was still wearing his deputy sheriff’s uniform. He had just come off the night shift. Ever since he had announced his candidacy for sheriff, his boss and opponent, Kevin Mullowney, had assigned him to the night shift, or to jail duty, every day. These were considered the least desirable duties a deputy sheriff could perform. Clyde agreed that guarding the county jail was an ordeal, but he didn’t mind the night shift so much. He wasn’t getting any sleep anyway.
Last night he’d been given responsibility for the region lying to the north of the city of Nishnabotna, which basically amounted to lazily circumnavigating Lake Pla-Mor looking for interesting people and situations, and then shining the cop light on them. The vacation cabins along the lake’s shore were an inviting target for burglars, the parks and boat ramps a favorite haunt of teenaged lovers, fighters, drinkers, and drug abusers. All of these people were happy to make themselves scarce as soon as Clyde rolled up and pinioned them in the blue halogen beam of his cop spotlight. Sometimes he had to garble something harsh and unintelligible into his PA before they would get lost—the young women covering their faces and giggling uncontrollably, the young men valorously flipping him the bird.
It had been rainy last night, and so things had been slower than usual along Lake Pla-Mor. If an irate taxpayer were to corner Clyde Banks today and demand that he justify the amount that had been spent, during the last eight hours, on his salary, overhead, and benefits, Clyde would be able to offer only that he had recovered one of the university’s rowboats.
He had noticed it while proceeding along Dike Street, which ran along the top of the dam on the Nishnabotna River that had brought Lake Pla-Mor into existence. The boat, a big old dinged-up aluminum beast, had apparently drifted down the lake and got hung up in a mess of reeds and cattails not far from the spillway. Clyde knew that the water was only knee-deep there, and so he had parked his unit nearby, pulled on some waders from the trunk, sloshed out, and grabbed it. He payed out its bow rope, clambered back up on the shore, and then towed the boat away from the dam until he reached a swimming beach a few hundred yards farther north.
The boat had been stolen from the university boathouse on the other side of the lake, which had to be one of the most popular burglary sites in the entire county. It was almost a mandatory rite of passage for young men from either the high school or the university to break into it at some point during their lives, steal a rowboat or canoe, and go out on the lake for some aimless, drunken fun. From the beach where Clyde brought this particular boat to shore, he could look directly across the lake and see the streetlights that had been put up in the boathouse parking lot as a pathetic self-defense measure. He considered simply rowing this boat across and putting it back where it belonged, which would have taken a while but would have been more useful and productive than his usual night-shift activities. But one of the boat’s oars was missing. So he dragged it up on the beach as far as he could. This was not very far, because the boat had a couple inches of rainwater in the bottom, and a bit of gravel, so it was heavy. He tied the painter to the leg of a picnic table and made a mental note to call the boathouse in the morning and let them know about it.
Desiree mumbled something that was lost in the self-righteous harrumphing of the Mr. Coffee.
“Come again?” Clyde said.
“Get rid of that car,” Desiree said. “It’s not a good kid car.”
Clyde dropped the paper and stared at his wife’s back, which now, only three weeks postpartum, was just as skinny as it always had been before. “You mean the pickup truck?”
“We need the pickup truck to haul things,” Desiree said. “Baby furniture. Stuff for fixing up your buildings.”
“So you’re saying—”
“We have to get rid of the Celica,” Desiree said. She said it as if it were a new idea, and hers. In fact, Desiree had bought the Celica to begin with. Clyde had been trying to get rid of it ever since. But he knew that it would be unwise to agree right away, because this might be construed as gloating.
“Are you sure?” he said craftily.
“We can’t deal with a two-door. It just doesn’t work with a baby seat. Ask Marie. Marie and Jeff had two two-doors, and they had to get rid of both of them.”
“If you say so,” Clyde said, and when Desiree did not change her mind and protest right away, he felt quietly satisfied. An issue of long standing had now been settled, and Clyde had been given carte blanche to settle it his way.