"Yes."

"Pick you up in 'bout fifteen minutes."

I was standing in front of the motel by the lobby door when Becker pulled up in a black Ford Crown Victoria. There was a blue light sitting on the dashboard, and a long buggy whip antenna, but no police markings. When I got in, the car smelled of food. Becker was drinking coffee. On the seat beside him was a large brown paper bag.

"Got us some sausage biscuits," Becker said, "and coffee. Help yourself."

He pulled the car away from the motel and out onto the county road.

"What about granola?" I said.

"Have to go over to Atlanta for that," Becker said. "People in Columbia County don't eat granola and don't tolerate those who do."

I poured a little container of cream into a paper cup full of coffee and stirred in several sugars. I drank some, and fished out a large biscuit with a sausage patty in the middle.

"Okay," I said. "I'll make do."

"Figured you'd eat most things," Becker said.

"What about the horse shooting?"

"Stable over in Alton, Canterbury Farms, somebody snuck around their stable last night, shot a filly named Carolina Moon."

"Dead?"

"Don't know," Becker said. "Just picked it up off the wire. Got no jurisdiction, you know, over in South Carolina."

"Me either," I said.

"Hell, you got no jurisdiction anywhere," Becker said.

"It's very freeing," I said.

I drank some more coffee as the Georgia landscape gave way with no discernible change to the South Carolina landscape. I checked my arteries. Blood still seemed to be getting through, so I had another sausage biscuit.

I was experiencing a little of the separateness I always felt when I was away from Susan. It wasn't unreality exactly, it was more a sense that there was a large empty space around me. Even now, sitting in a squad car, maybe eighteen inches from another guy, there was a sense of crystalline isolation. It was not loneliness, nor did the feeling make me unhappy. It was simply a feeling different from any other, a feeling available only when I was away from Susan. I was alone.

"What do you know about the Clive family?" I said.

"Somebody been shooting their horses," Becker said.

"Besides that," I said. "Any of them had any problems with the law?"

"Clives are the most important family in the whole Columbia County," Becker said. "They don't have trouble with the law."

"Have they come to the attention of the law?" I said.

We were driving along a two-lane highway now. There were fields with farm equipment standing idle, and occasionally a Safeway market or a Burger King. Traffic was light. Becker kept his eyes on the road.

"You got a reason for asking?" he said.

"I'm practicing to be a detective," I said. "Plus the family seems to be full of people who would get in trouble."

" 'Cept for Penny."

"Except for her," I said.

"Old man's calmed down some, since Dolly came aboard."

"But before that?"

"Well. For a while he was married to the girls' mother. Don't remember her name right this minute. But she was a hippie."

"Lot of hippies around thirty years ago," I said.

"Yep, and that's when they got married. But times changed and she didn't. 'Bout ten years ago she ran off with a guy played in a rock band."

"So Penny would have been about fifteen."

"Yep. The other girls were a little older."

"They're two years apart," I said. "So they'd have been seventeen and nineteen."

"See that," Becker said. "You been detecting more than you pretend."

"I'm a modest guy," I said. "How was the divorce?"

"Don't know nothing about the divorce."

"Was there a divorce?"

"Don't know. Not my department."

"So what was Clive doing between the hippie and Dolly?"

"Everything he could," Becker said.

There was a two-wheeled horse-drawn piece of farm machinery inching along in our lane. I didn't know anything about farm machinery, but this looked as if it had something to do with hay. A black man in overalls and a felt hat was sitting up on the rig, though he didn't seem to be paying much attention. The horse appeared to be the one on duty. Becker slowed as we approached it and swerved carefully out to pass.

"Booze, women, that sort of thing?"

"A lot of both," Becker said.

"Ah, sweet bird of youth," I said.

Becker grinned without looking at me.

"You hang around those Clive girls, you might get younger yourself," he said.

"While Clive's living the male fantasy life," I said, "who's looking after the girls?"

"Don't know," Becker said.

"Is there anything in this for me?" I said. "Clive screw somebody's wife, and somebody wants to get even? He sleep with some woman and ditch her and she wants to get even?"

"I don't pay attention to shit like that," Becker said. "Do I look like Ann Landers?"

"You look sort of like Archie Moore," I said. "And you sound like a guy who knows things he's not saying."

"It's a special talent," Becker said.

"The real talent is sounding like you don't know anything you're not telling," I said.

"I can do that," Becker said.

"If you want to," I said.

Becker watched the road.

"So why don't you want to?"

We passed a sign that read, "Welcome to Alton."

"Because you want me to wonder."

Becker slowed and turned into a narrow dirt road that went under high pines, limbless the first thirty feet or so up. I remembered it from my last visit, eight years ago.

"You want me to look into them, but you don't want it to have come from you, because it could come back and bite you in the ass."

"Clives the most powerful family in Columbia County," Becker said, and turned off the dirt road into a wide clearing and parked near a white rail fence near the Canterbury Farms training track.

FOURTEEN

WE DIDN'T LEARN much in Alton. An Alton County Sheriff's detective named Felicia Boudreau was on the case. I knew her from eight years earlier, and Becker and I talked with her sitting in her car at the stable site.

Carolina Moon, she told us, had been a filly of modest promise. Her groom had found her dead in her stall when he went to feed her in the morning. She'd been shot once in the neck with a.22 long bullet, which had punctured her aorta, and the horse had bled to death.

"We have the bullet," Felicia said. "Vet took it out of the horse."

"We'd like to see if we can match it against ours," Becker said.

Felicia said, "Sure."

"Nothing else?" I said.

"Well, it's nice to see you again," she said.

"You too," I said. "Got any clues?"

"None."

"Lot of that going around," I said.

"What's it been, eight years?"

"Yep. Still getting your hair done in Batesburg?" I said.

"Yes, I am."

"Still looks great," I said.

"Yes, it does."

We talked with Frank Ferguson, who owned the horse. He didn't have any idea why someone would shoot his horse. I remembered him from the last time I was in Alton, but he didn't remember me. He had been smoking a meerschaum pipe when I talked with him eight years before. I thought of saying something about it, but decided it would be showing off, especially after my hair-done-in-Batesburg triumph.