"I guess I met you before," Buffett said. "You operated on me?"

"I was one of the neurosurgeons, yes."

Gould lifted the chart from the rack and flipped it open. He skimmed it, set it down. He leaned forward and, with a penlight, looked into Buffett's eyes. He asked the policeman to watch the doctors finger as it did figure eights then to extend his arms and touch his nose.

Donnie Buffett did as he was told.

The doctor said, "Good." Which did not mean good or anything else, then he asked, "How you feeling, Officer?"

"Okay, I guess. My shoulder stings."

"Ah." He examined Buffett's chart again and he examined it for a very long moment, it seemed to Buffett.

"Doctor…?" Buffett's voice faded.

The doctor did not encourage him to continue. He closed the metal cover of the chart and said, "Officer, I'd like to talk to you about your injury, tell you exactly what happened, what we did. What we're going to do."

"Sure."

"You were shot in the back. Several slugs hit your bullet-proof vest. They were small-.22-caliber-and shattered right away. A third bullet hit the top side of the vest. It was deflected but it grazed your scapula, your shoulder blade. That's the pain you feel there. It's a minor wound. We removed the bullet easily. There's some risk of sepsis-that's infection-but the odds are that won't happen."

Gould was taking out a pen, a fancy gold and lacquer pen, and was drawing what looked like the lower half of a skeleton on the back of a receipt.

"Donnie, three of the bullets hit you below the vest. They entered here, that's where the lumbar region of the spinal cord joins the sacral region. One shattered and stopped here." The pen, top replaced, was now a pointer. "The other two lodged in your intestine but missed the kidneys and bladder. We removed all the pieces of lead. We've repaired the damage with sutures that will absorb into the tissue. You won't need any further surgery, unless we have a sepsis situation."

"Okay," Buffett said agreeably. He squinted and studied the diagram as if he'd be tested on it later.

"Donnie, the bullet that shattered-it entered your spinal cord here."

Buffett was nodding. He was a cop. He had seen death. He had seen pain. He had felt pain. He was totally calm. His injury couldn't be serious. If it were he'd be hooked up to huge machines. Respirators and jet cockpit controls. All he had was a tube in his dick and an IV that was feeding him fattening sugar. That was nothing. No problem. He felt pain now, a wonderful pain that ran through his legs, playing hide-and seek. If he were paralyzed he wouldn't be feeling pain. "Donnie, we're going to refer you to a Dr. Weiser, one of St. Louis's top SCI neurologists and therapists. SCI, that's spinal cord injury."

"But I'm okay, aren't I?'

"You're not in a life-threatening condition. With upper SCIs, there's a risk of respiratory or cardiac failure… Those can be very troublesome."

Troublesome.

"But your accident was lower SCI. That was fortunate in terms of your survival."

"Doctor, I'll be able to walk, won't I? The thing is, my job, I'm a cop. I have to walk." He lifted his palms as if he were embarrassed to be explaining somediing so simple.

"Uhn, Donnie," the doctor said slowly, "your prognosis is essentially nonambulatory."

Nonambulatory.

"What does?…" Buffett's throat closed down and he was unable to complete his question. Because he knew exacdy what it meant.

"Your spinal cord was almost completely severed," Gould said. Buffett was looking directly into his eyes but did not see any of the intense sympathy that was pouring from them. "With the state of the art at the present time I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about it. You won't walk, no."

"Oh. Well. I see."

"Officer, you're very lucky. You could easily have been killed. Or it might have been a quadriplegic situation."

Sure, that's true.

Gould stood up. The chart got replaced on the bed, the doctors nifty pen went back into his shirt. "Dr. Weiser is much more competent to talk about your injury than I am. You couldn't ask for a better expert. A nurse will be coming by to schedule an appointment later." He smiled, shook Buffett's hand. "We'll do everything we can for you, Officer. Don't worry about a thing."

It was several minutes later that Donnie Buffett said, "No. I won't," and only then realized that the doctor was no longer in the room.

Philip Lombro had this habit. He would polish his shoes at least twice a day. He kept a big horsehair brush in his desk at work and a smaller pig-bristle brush in his attache case, along with chamois squares. Sometimes he would polish the shoes three, four, five times in a single day. He used Kiwi a lot. His favorite, though, was Meltonian Creme a chaussures.

He had no obsession over the shoes themselves-he owned only seven pairs-and he did not have a foot fetish. (He was not even sure what a foot fetish was or what somebody with a foot fetish did.) What he liked was shiny shoes and the process of getting them that way. Putting your feet into newly polished shoes was a regal feeling.

This morning he sat in the office of Lombro & Associates in downtown Maddox and absently ran the brush over his oxblood wing tips.

The office was in the shadow of a huge redbrick building that had started life as Maddox Omnibus and Carriage Company and had become, through the generations, Maddox Electric Automobile Company, then -the Maddox Clutch Company, and recently the Maddox Machinery Division of Fujitomo Limited.

Several stiff brush bristles became dislodged from the brush and fell to the floor. Lombro bent down and picked them up, then flicked them into the waste-basket. He wiped his fingers with a spit-moistened Kleenex. Outside the window, a piece of newspaper floated past and vanished. Lombro stared at the sides of the Maddox Omnibus Building. Lombro remembered, from ten years ago, the Reporter photo of a young man who killed himself by jumping off one of the factory's huge smokestacks. Wearing a suit, he had died crumpled in the roof of a delivery truck. It enfolded him like a blanket.

This was what the Maddox Omnibus and Carriage Company Building signified for him: death. And this thought, in turn, led to Ralph Bales.

Lombro had met Ralph Bales at the wedding of his sister's daughter. Lombro, never married, regretted that he'd never been a father; nieces and nephews in St. Louis area became surrogate children. He doted, he spoiled them, he took them on outings. He was more astonished than their parents to see them become adults. When his brother-in-law could not pick up the tab for the girl's wedding Lombro himself paid for the function.

One of the guests had been Ralph Bales and what caught Lombro's attention was that Ralph Bales had brought a gun to the wedding.

Late in the evening, Lombro, standing at the urinal in the men's John of Orsini's restaurant, was aware of someone entering behind him and going into a stall. He then heard a clunk of something falling and glanced under the door. A hand was quickly retrieving a pistol. Lombro washed his hands quickly and left the men's room. He waited outside, hiding behind a plant, to catch a look at the intruder. A few minutes later Ralph Bales emerged, slicking back his thinning hair with damp hands.

Lombro didn't know what to do. A friend of a friend on the groom's side, Ralph Bales had been invited, true, so he probably was not a robber. On the other hand, Lombro felt responsible for the safety of his four hundred guests.

Finally, after an agonizing half hour of indecision, Lombro had walked up to Ralph Bales and, as the children were cutting the cake, struck up a conversation. He learned that Ralph Bales had grown up in St. Louis. He was orphaned young – as Lombro had been – and had made a career of various riverfront jobs. They talked careers, real estate, making money, losing money. Ralph Bales mentioned, vaguely, unions and shipping companies and waterfront services and Teamsters. He lived in a house not far from Lambert Field. He enjoyed working in his garden. Lombro did, too, he said, though he hated the sun.