Ralph threw back his head and laughed. Leydecker laughed with him.

“So they’re assholes,” he finished with a shrug. “But they’re our assholes. Does that sounds like I’m joking? I’m not. WomanCare, Friends of Life, Body Watch, Daily Bread… they’re our assholes, Derry assholes, and I really don’t mind watching out for our own.

That’s why I took this job, and why I stay with it. But you’ll have to forgive me if I’m less than crazy about being tapped to watch out for some long-stemmed American Beauty from New York who’s going to fly in here and give an incendiary speech and then fly out with a few more press-clippings and enough material for chapter five of her new book.

“To our faces she’ll talk about what a wonderful little grass-roots community we are, and when she gets back to her duplex on Park Avenue, she’ll tell her friends about how she hasn’t managed to shampoo the stink of our paper mills out of her hair yet. She is woman, hear her roar… and if we’re lucky, the whole thing will quiet down with no one dead or disabled.”

Ralph had become sure of what those greenish flickers meant.

“But you’re scared, aren’t you?” he asked.

Leydecker looked at him, surprised. “Shows, does it?”

“Only a little,” Ralph said, and thought: just in your aura, John, that’s all. just in your aura.

“Yeah, I’m scared. On a personal level I’m scared of fucking up the assignment, which has absolutely no upside to compensate for all the things that can go wrong. On a professional level I’m scared of something happening to her on my watch. On a community level I’m fucking terrified of what happens if there’s some sort of confrontation and the genie comes out of the bottle… more coffee, Ralph?”

“I’ll pass. I ought to be going soon, anyway. What’s going to happen to Pickering?”

He didn’t actually care much about Charlie Pickering’s fate, but the big cop would probably think it strange if he asked about May Locher before he asked about Pickering. Suspicious, maybe.

“Steve Anderson-the a.d.a. who questioned you-and Pickerings court-appointed attorney are probably horse-trading even as we speak.

Pickering’s guy will be saying he might be able to get his client-the thought of Charlie Pickering being an’Vone’s client, for anything, sort of blows my mind, by the way-to plead out to second-degree assault. Anderson will say the time has come to put Pickering away for good and he’s going for attempted murder.

Pickering’s lawyer will pretend to be shocked, and tomorrow your buddy is going to be charged with first-degree assault with a deadly weapon and bound over for trial. Then, possibly in December but more likely early next year, you’ll be called as the star witness.”

“Bail?”

“It’ll probably be set in the forty-thousand-dollar range. You can get out on ten percent if the rest can be secured in event of flight, but Charlie Pickering doesn’t have a house, a car, or even a Timer watch. In the end, he’s liable to go back to Juniper Hill, but that’s really not the object of the game. We’re going to be able to keep him off the street for quite awhile this time, and with people like Charlie, that’s the object of the game.”

“Any chance The Friends of Life might go his bail?”

“Nah. Ed Deepneau spent a lot of last week with him, the two of them drinking coffee in the Bagel Shop. I imagine Ed was giving Charlie the lowdown on the Centurions and the King of Diamonds-”

“Crimson King is what Ed-”

“Whatever,” Leydecker agreed, waving a hand. “But most of all I imagine he spent the time explaining how you were the devil’s right hand man and how only a smart, brave, and dedicated fellow like Charlie Pickering could take you out of the picture.”

“You make him sound like such a calculating shit,” Ralph said.

He was remembering the Ed Deepneau he’d played chess with before Carolyn had fallen ill. That Ed had been an intelligent, wellspoken, civilized man with a deep capacity for kindness. Ralph still found it all but impossible to reconcile that Ed with the one he’d first glimpsed in July of 1992. He had come to think of the more recent arrival as “rooster Ed.”

“Not just a calculating shit, a dangerous calculating shit,” Leydecker said. “For him Charlie was just a tool, like a paring knife you’d use to peel an apple with. If the blade snaps off a paring knife, you don’t run to the knife-grinder’s to get a new one put on; that’s too much trouble. You toss it in the wastebasket and get a new paring knife instead. That’s the way guys like Ed treat guys like Charlie, and since Ed is The Friends of Life-for the time being, at least-I don’t think you have to worry about Charlie making bail.

In the next few days, he’s going to be lonelier than a Maytag repairman. Okay?”

“Okay,” Ralph said. He was a little appalled to realize he felt sorry for Pickering. “I want to thank you for keeping my name out of the paper, too… if you were the one who did it, that is.”

There had been a brief mention of the incident in the Derry News’s Police Beat column, but it said only that Charles H. Pickering had been arrested on “a weapons charge” at the Derry Public Library.

“Sometimes we ask them for a favor, sometimes they ask us for “one,” Leydecker said, standing up. “It’s how things work in the real world. If the nuts in The Friends of Life and the prigs in The Friends of WomanCare ever discover that, my job is going to get a lot easier.”

Ralph plucked the rolled-up Dumbo poster from the wastebasket, then stood up on his side of Leydecker’s desk. “Could I have this?

I know a little girl who might really like it, in a year or so.”

Leydecker held out his hands expansively. “Be my guest-think of it as a little premium for being a good citizen. just don’t ask for my crotchless panties.”

Ralph laughed. “Wouldn’t think of it.”

“Seriously, I appreciate you coming in. Thanks, Ralph.”

“No problem.” He reached across the desk, shook Leydecker’s hand, then headed for the door. He felt absurdly like Lieutenant Columbo on TV-all he needed was the cigar and the ratty trench coat. He put his hand on the knob, then paused and turned back.

“Can I ask you about something totally unrelated to Charlie Pickering?”

“Fire away.”

“This morning in the Red Apple Store I heard that Mrs. Locher, my neighbor up the street, died in the night. Nothing so surprising about that; she had emphysema, But there are police-line tapes up between the sidewalk and her front yard, plus a sign on the door saying the site has been sealed by the Derry P,D. Do you know what it’s about?”

Leydecker looked at him so long and hard that Ralph would have felt acutely uncomfortable… if not for the man’s aura. There was nothing in it which communicated suspicion.

God, Ralph, you’re taking these things a little too seriously aren’t you?

Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Either way he was glad that the green flickers at the edges of Leydecker’s aura had not reappeared, “Why are you looking at me that way?” Ralph asked. “If I presumed or spoke out of turn, I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” Leydecker said. “It’s a little weird, that’s all.

If I tell you about it, can you keep it quiet?”

“Yes.”

“It’s your downstairs tenant I’m chiefly worried about.

When the word discretion is mentioned, it’s not the Prof I think of.”

Ralph laughed heartily. “I won’t say a word to him-SCOut’s Honor-but it’s interesting you’d mention him; Bill vent to school with Mrs. Locher, way back when. Grammar school.”

“Man, I can’t imagine the Prof in grammar school,” Leydecker said.

“Can you?”

“Sort of,” Ralph said, but the picture which rose in his mind was an exceedingly peculiar one: Bill McGovern looking like a cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and Tom Sawyer in a pair of knickers, long white socks… and a Panama hat.

“We’re not sure what happened to Mrs. Locher,” Leydecker said.